


Maintenance

by devovitsuasartes



Series: Maintenance [1]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, IN SPACE!, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-02 09:50:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10942020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovitsuasartes/pseuds/devovitsuasartes
Summary: A colony ship embarks on a 51-year mission with only two conscious passengers: a maintenance worker, and a maintenance android.





	1. Launch

The lottery takes place a week before the launch. The people with husbands and wives and children are excluded, along with everyone over the age of 25. The lottery is actually a randomized ranking - the first person on the list is the person who will stay awake during the mission. The second person will take over the job if the first person dies, the third person will take over if the second person dies and so on down a list of over two hundred names.

When the draw happens, Mickey isn’t surprised to see his name at the top. He’s had shitty luck his whole life, so it only makes sense that this shitty luck would get in the way of his chance for a new life. He considers turning down the job and staying on Earth - let Person #2 spend the rest of their life in isolation instead. But in the end, his hate for this fucking planet and his burning desire to escape it at any cost wins out, and Mickey agrees to the deal.

There are 5000 colonists in total, and the majority of them are put into hypersleep before launch. The rest of them - Mickey, the pilot, the captain, the first mate, a dozen other assorted crew members, and the maintenance android - spend several days doing final checks on the ship’s machinery and programming. In theory nothing should go wrong, but…

“We’re going to be travelling for 51 years,” the captain tells Mickey. “Even if there’s a zero-point-zero-zero-zero-one percent chance of mechanical failure, the longer we’re out there, the greater the chance of us running into that zero-point-zero-zero-zero-one percent chance.”

This is the fourteenth colonization mission from Earth. Of the previous missions, only three were successful. Most of the early missions failed before the ships even reached their intended destinations - mechanical failures and space storms destroying the vessels, along with their precious cargo. Later missions successfully reached their destinations, but found the new home planets to be far more hostile than anticipated - disease, aggressive animal life and barren soil whittling the colonies’ numbers down to nothing. But the last three missions succeeded, and now that they know how to avoid all the things that might go wrong, this mission should be successful as well.

The crew members look at Mickey warily as he helps them into their hypersleep pods. He’s not the most comforting guardian, with his ugly knuckle tattoos and the way his face naturally settles into a scowl. He didn’t go to a fancy space academy like the rest of them; Mickey learned on the job, picking up mechanical engineering knowledge on scrappy little cargo vessels and (though he didn’t put this on his resumé) pirate ships. He’s probably overqualified for this job - a monkey could do it, if a monkey could read and follow the instructions in the ship’s emergency protocol document.

The captain goes under last. She shakes Mickey’s hand, looks him in the eye, and says, “I hope to see you when I wake up.”

Mickey snorts. “If I’m even still alive.”

“Use the onboard gym every day. Eat clean. Take your supplements. I think you’ll make it.” She nods at the maintenance android, which is standing quietly by the airlock. “Ian will carry out regular health checks, and look after you if you get sick.”

She doesn’t say so, but Mickey knows that the android will also monitor his mental health, and if he shows signs of the space crazies he’ll be put into hypersleep if it’s feasible, or outright killed if it’s not.

Mickey closes the captain’s pod and does final checks. Then, he’s alone.

-

Daily checks only occupy a few hours of Mickey’s time each day, and he finds it surprisingly easy to fill the rest of the hours. He works out in the gym, building his muscles. He plays video games and watches old TV shows and movies. He plants the cannabis seeds that he smuggled onboard in the ship’s hydroponic garden, next to the fruit trees and vegetables that will provide fresh food for him during the journey. A week goes by, then two, and then a month.

Mickey crosses paths with the android a few times a day, and carries out maintenance checks on it once a week. It’s an EN-30 model - one of the older ones, without all the bells and whistles of the top-of-the-line androids. But its simplicity makes it more durable and less likely to malfunction, which is vital on a mission like this one.

The captain and the crewmembers affectionately called it Ian, and treated it like a beloved pet dog. Of course, it’s designed to be easy for people to anthropomorphize. It looks almost perfectly human, and has a pleasant face and enough idiosyncrasies to mimic a personality. But Mickey’s spent enough time with machines to know a machine when he sees one, and so he treats the EN-30 like any other tool. He doesn’t even really interact with it, beyond the system checks, until the evening that his frustration with a video game gets the better of him.

It’s a co-op game, with the option of assigning the Player 2 role to the game’s AI. The only problem is, the game’s AI is shit. It gets stuck on corners, barely hits anything when it shoots, and barely seems to even try taking cover. After Mickey is forced to stop and revive it for the eighth time, he lets out a snarl of frustration and throws the controller across the room.

“Is everything alright, Mickey?” the android asks, making him jump. It’s standing a little way behind Mickey, with its shoulders casually slouched and its hands in the pocket of its jumpsuit. Idiosyncrasies. They’re damn convincing.

Mickey takes a deep, calming breath. He doesn’t want the android thinking he’s getting the space crazies. “I’m fine. Just… this fucking game.”

“Would you like me to pick a different game for you?”

It’s tempting, but Mickey isn’t about to let this level beat him because of some shitty AI. “No. Stay here, though.” He goes to pick up his controller, and as he does so he presses a panel underneath the screen. There’s a hissing sound, and then a drawer slides out, with several spare controllers in it. Mickey picks up an extra one, closes the drawer, and then walks over to the android.

“Here,” he says, holding out the second controller. “You’re Player 2.”

The android doesn’t look phased. “Sure thing, Mickey.”

They start the level over, and Mickey is pleased to discover that the EN-30’s AI is way better than anything that a video game company could program. In the end he has to tell the android to limit the number of shots it takes, just so that Mickey can have a chance to kill something. It kind of feels like playing the game on Easy Mode, but it’s not like there’s anyone around to judge him for it.

After defeating the boss, Mickey grins in triumph and says, “Fuck yeah!” The android, sitting next to him on the couch, smiles and raises its hand for a high-five. Mickey just rolls his eyes and ignores it, and after a moment or two the android lowers its hand.

“That was fun, Mickey,” it says.

Mickey lets out a short laugh. “Is it in your programming, to say people’s names a lot? Is it s’posed to make people like you more?”

It’s a rhetorical question, really, but the android answers anyway. “I could say your name less, if you like.”

“Do whatever you want, man. I don’t give a fuck.”

-

It’s another couple of months before Mickey interacts with the android properly again, and once again it’s because the ship’s entertainment fails him. Namely, the ship’s porn selection.

Mickey has the option of taking a supplement that will eliminate his sex drive, but he’s wary of it shrinking his testicles or making his dick fall off or something, so he doesn’t take it. He jerks off a couple of times a day, most days, but although there’s terabytes of porn stored on the ship, it’s designed to cover a wide range of interests and there’s only a limited number of videos that fit Mickey’s particular kinks. Besides, watching people kissing and fucking is just an unwelcome reminder that Mickey will never kiss or fuck another person again.

So he calls the android to his quarters - a claustrophobic little crew cabin on Deck C. When it shows up it says, “Hello, Mickey,” and then stands there quietly, waiting for further instructions.

Lying on his bed in boxers and a shirt, Mickey taps a cigarette out of the packet on his bedside table and lights it up, taking a slow drag as he looks the android up and down.

“That’s contraband,” the EN-30 says, a note of disapproval in its voice. “And in any case, smoking may shorten your lifespan. You should be doing everything possible to survive for the duration of the journey.”

Mickey deliberately blows smoke in the android’s direction. “I want your fuckin’ opinion, tinhead, I’ll ask for it.” He sits up on the bed, lets his feet drop off the side of it, his knees spread wide, and he leans back against the bulkhead.

The android stands there, silent, looking at him passively. It’s a beautiful design, really. There’s no uncanny valley here - to the untrained eye, this android would look just like a person. Yeah, Mickey can make this work.

“Unzip your jumpsuit,” he says, his voice harsh from the smoke.

The android moves to obey, without question.

“Slowly,” Mickey adds, scratching his thigh lazily.

The EN-30 draws the zipper down, exposing its pale chest. There are curls of synthetic hair smattered across its upper torso, more of them on its lower stomach. It doesn’t have a navel. That’s one of the markers they use, to make the androids distinct from people. If it doesn’t have a belly button, you know it wasn’t grown inside a womb.

Once the zipper is drawn down fully, the android lets its hands drop to its side again. It waits patiently for further instructions. Mickey puts the cigarette back on his mouth, and leaves it there this time, freeing up his hand. He reaches down, gropes his cock through his boxers. It’s just starting to chub up, and Mickey rubs it until he’s got a semi.

“Your mouth produces lubricant, right?” he says. “I saw it in your specs.”

“Yes, Mickey.”

Mickey braces his feet against the floor, lifts his hips off the bed, and pushes his boxers down to his knees. The artificial gravity takes them the rest of the way, and they pool around his ankles.

“Get over here,” he says, the cigarette wagging up and down as he speaks, his voice a little distorted around it. “Get on your knees.”

The android walks over to him, slowly, straight-backed. Once it’s standing between Mickey’s spread legs, it drops smoothly into a kneeling position.

“Mmm,’ Mickey hums appreciatively around his cigarette, his eyelids drooping as he reaches down between his legs and cradles his balls, gives his hardening cock a few good tugs. “OK. You know how to give a blow job, yeah?”

An odd expression flickers over the android’s face. “Yes.”

“Alright then. Get to it.”

The android doesn’t move. Mickey thinks that maybe the instruction wasn’t clear enough.

“Suck my dick.”

The EN-30 is quiet for a moment. He looks down at Mickey’s cock, then back up at Mickey. Then he says, quite firmly, “No.”

Mickey rolls his eyes. Fucking shitty AI. “Come on, you stupid goddamn machine. Just _do_ it.”

“No,” the android says again.

“Ugh.” Mickey sits up, buries his fist in the android’s soft, ginger hair, and tries to force its head down towards his crotch. But the EN-30 resists with ease. Mickey can’t make it move. And when he tries thrusting his dick up closer to its face, it moves its head backwards to avoid contact.

Mickey is frustrated and angry. He lets go of the android’s hair and kicks it in the chest, knocking it backwards.

“Fucking useless piece of shit,” he snarls. “God _damn_ it.”

The android stands up, and zips its jumpsuit back up. “Was there anything else you needed, sir?” it asks. Its voice seems somehow colder than before.

“No,” Mickey snaps. “I needed a fucking blow job, but apparently you’re not programmed for that shit.”

“I am, sir.” That edge is still there in its tone. “Sexual functions are quite simple, mechanically speaking.”

Mickey glares at it. “Great, so give me a fucking blow job.”

“No.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

Mickey had a tirade ready and waiting, but that answer stops him in his tracks. He stares up at the android, breathing heavily. Suddenly he feels weirdly self-conscious about lying here with his cock exposed, so he stands up and pulls his boxers back up. He can’t shake the feeling that the EN-30 is watching him with an air of disdain.

“Get the fuck out,” he snaps, not looking at the android. “I’m done with you.”

“As you wish, sir,” the android says, and this time it’s unmistakable - a mocking lilt at the edges of its voice.

Once the android has left, Mickey flops back down onto his bed and stares up at the overhead, his erection completely wilted. He sucks hard on his cigarette, breathes out the smoke, and watches it dissipate above him. It takes a long time for him to fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I watched Alien: Covenant and there is some surprise robot gayness between one Michael Fassbender android and another Michael Fassbender android (actual quote from the movie: "I'll do the fingering.")
> 
> So I was like, "Android homoerotica? If Ridley Scott can do it, I can do it too."


	2. Mess

The morning after the android refuses to give him a blowjob, Mickey is a toxic mix of humiliated and pissed off - a cocktail that’s compounded by lack of sleep. He stomps around the ship doing his usual checks, then heads to the gym and goes several rounds on the punching bag until his knuckles are aching and the bag starts to split. Sweaty, exhausted, and still unsatisfied, he makes his way down to the mess hall.

Mickey wants a cup of coffee, bad, but he’s feeling fucking petty. So he calls the android on comms and tells it to come to him. It arrives five minutes later, its gait irritatingly unhurried, and stands calmly with its hands in its jumpsuit pockets.

“Hi, Mickey,” it says. Its voice is smooth and pleasant, with no trace of the ugliness that Mickey had heard in it the night before. “You need something?”

Mickey sits down heavily in one of the mess hall chairs, enjoying the sound of the metal legs screeching across the deck. He props his feet up on the table, pulls his pack of cigarettes out of his jumpsuit pocket and lights one up. Then, after he’s taken a deep, rebellious drag, he finally answers.

“Get me a cup of coffee.”

He’s hoping for some kind of reaction - honestly, Mickey’s interested to see if he can piss the android off again. But the EN-30 just obediently heads to the kitchen area and presses a series of buttons on the hot drinks machine. The machine hisses and gurgles, and then the android walks over to Mickey and sets a steaming mug down on the table.

Mickey looks up at the android. It waits politely for further instructions. Mickey reaches out to the mug, and very deliberately pushes it to the edge of the table until it teeters and then falls off the edge. Coffee splashes and splatters in a wide puddle on the floor, and the plastic mug bounces and rolls.

“Whoops,” Mickey drones mockingly. “You’d better clean that up, and get me another one.”

The spreading pool of coffee creeps close to the android’s shoes, and it takes a step backwards. “Of course, Mickey,” it says.

Mickey smokes his cigarette slowly and watches the android fetch this high-tech super-absorbent cloth, then kneel down and mop up the mess. Then it gets him another cup of coffee, and Mickey knocks that onto the floor as well, and tells the android to clean it up.

This goes on for about an hour.

Finally, when Mickey asks for his eighth cup of coffee with lazy amusement, the android is quiet for a moment. Then it says, “No.”

Mickey raises an eyebrow. “No?”

“No. I don’t think you really want a cup of coffee. I think you’re just going to spill it again.”

“Why do you care?”

The android stares down at him solemnly. “It’s a waste of resources.”

Mickey snickers. Then he puts on his sincerest expression and says, “Seriously. I really want a cup of coffee. I promise I’ll drink it this time.”

The android hesitates. Then it says, “Alright.”

It brings Mickey another cup of coffee. He knocks it onto the floor.

-

The good mood lasts all week. Mickey breaks a new personal best doing pull-ups, and gets a new high score on three of his favorite video games. He continues to treat the android like a butler - making it clean his quarters and wash his clothes and bring him his meals. While it sits quietly at its refueling port, charging up its batteries, Mickey chews up little wads of paper and shoots them at the android through a straw. Some of them bounce off it, and others stick to its face. It flinches a little every time it gets hit - a programmed reaction, designed to make it seem more human - and a couple of times it asks him to stop. But it doesn’t get angry.

At least, it doesn’t seem to.

Mickey runs out of cigarettes, but he doesn’t mind too much, because he’s got something better growing down in Hydroponics. At the end of the week, he slaps a nicotine patch on his arm and heads down to check on his cannabis plants.

Only they’re not there.

-

“You did fucking _what?_ ” Mickey snarls, pacing back and forth in front of the android.

“I unearthed them and disposed of them using one of the ship’s airlocks,” the EN-30 replies calmly.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“It was contraband.”

“It was none of your fucking business!”

“Everything on this ship is my business. I found a fault, and I fixed it.”

“Oh yeah? Well I found a fault too. I think it’s a fault that your goddamn head is still attached to your body. How about I fix that?”

“No thanks.”

Mickey glares at the android, and that’s when it sees it - just the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of its mouth, disrupting its usual politely detached expression. It was what he’d been searching for the whole time he was tormenting it, but now he just wants to punch it off the android’s smug face.

He doesn’t, though. Mickey wipes a hand down his face, tries to calm himself. In a low, dangerous voice he says, “I had fucking plans for that weed. Our next jump is going to take us past the Helix Nebula. I was gonna get high as fuck and go up to the Observation Deck. But now you’ve blown all my goddamn weed into space, so I can’t fucking do that.”

The android shrugs. “If you’re under the influence of mind-altering substances, you can’t respond to an emergency. I had to do what was necessary to keep the ship safe. You can still look at the Helix Nebula.”

“It’s not the fucking same.”

“You swear too much.”

“Go fuck yourself in your robot fucking asshole with a fucking rusty screwdriver.”

-

“Mickey…”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I just wanted to ask what you’re doing. I’m not due for a system check-up until tomorrow.”

The android is sitting calmly on a stool in Engineering while Mickey uses a tablet to run through its systems. His brow is furrowed in concentration. Mickey knows a lot about mechanical engineering, but he doesn’t know much about programming. Most of this is beyond him.

“Is something wrong, Mickey?”

“Yeah, something’s wrong. You’ve been acting up lately.”

“In what way?”

“I mean you’ve been stressing me the fuck out. You’re supposed to keep me sane, not drive me nuts.”

“I’m sorry, Mickey.”

“Bullshit you’re sorry. You’re not sorry. You’re not anything. You’re a glorified Swiss army knife. Son of a _bitch_.” He tosses the tablet onto the table in frustration.

“What are you trying to do? Maybe I can help.”

Mickey raises an eyebrow, lets out of a huff of laughter. “Sure you can. Just tell me where your ‘blowjob on’ switch is.”

The android doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then it says, quietly, “Oh.”

“Yeah, my right hand needs a break. Gonna help me out?”

“There’s nothing you can do to make me perform sexual acts on you,” the android says, not looking at Mickey. “The ability to make choices is an essential part of my foundational programming. You can’t switch it off.”

Mickey takes a moment to process this. He takes a long look at the android - at its eyes with their deep green irises, and the delicate little freckles on its skin, and the synthetic ginger hairs on the backs of its arms.

“Stand up and take your jumpsuit off,” he says, half-expecting the android to refuse. But it stands up obediently, kicks off its soft shoes, unzips its jumpsuit and shrugs its way out of it. It leans down to pull the elasticated cuffs off its ankles, and then straightens up with perfect posture, shamelessly nude.

Mickey gets up off his stool and walks around the table to stand in front of the android, staring critically at its groin. It has a bush of ginger pubic hair, and its genitals are as realistic as its face - nicely rounded testicles, and a large cock.

“Cut, huh?’ he observes, a little dry-mouthed.

“No,” the android says, pedantically. And yeah, fine. Obviously they didn’t build it with a foreskin and then cut it off. They just skipped the foreskin entirely.

Mickey kneels down in front of the android, admiring the details of its design. God, it looks so real. He lifts a hand and flicks the android’s testicles sharply, and it gasps and flinches, one hand coming down to cover itself protectively.

“Just seems kinda dumb,” Mickey says at last. “To go to all the trouble of giving you sexuality, then not let you use it.”

“I can use it,” the android corrects. “But I can also choose not to.”

“Why?”

It shrugs. “It’s part of my foundational programming…”

“No, I mean.” Mickey stands up, scratches the back of his head. “Why did you choose not to? You only like girls, is that it?”

The EN-30 shakes its head. “I have sexual preferences. I prefer men.”

“So what, you think I’m ugly?”

It blinks at him, its synthetic pupils shifting in size as it does so. “No. You're well-proportioned. Your face is reasonably symmetrical.”

“Gee, fucking thanks. So why won’t you suck my dick?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

Mickey groans in frustration. “Why don’t you want to?”

“I don’t…” The android stops speaking mid-sentence, which makes Mickey’s mind explode with curiosity. They’re not supposed to do that. They’re supposed to pick a response, and say it. But after a seconds-long pause, the android concludes, “know.” Then it says it again, more firmly this time. “I don’t know.”

Mickey walks around the nude EN-30, fascinated. “You’re lying,” he states, unable to disguise how impressed he is. He stops in front of it, looks it square in the face (at a slight angle, because the android is taller than him). “What were you going to say, before?”

The EN-30 looks down at him. It seems to consider him for a moment. Then it says, “I don’t like you.”

“You mean, you don’t find me sexually attractive?”

“No, I find you sexually attractive. I don’t like _you._ I don’t like the way you talk to me. I think you’re awful.”

Mickey realizes, distantly, that his heart is pounding. There’s a strong, unpleasant feeling in his stomach, and he responds to it the only way he knows how.

“Fuck you, tincan,” he sneers. “You don’t feel shit. You don’t have likes and dislikes. You’re a fucking tool.” He gestures at the various bits of equipment on the table. “Just like them. And you hating me isn’t an emotion, it’s a goddamn malfunction.”

The android doesn’t even flinch. When it seems sure that Mickey is done with his insults it asks, “Can I put my clothes back on now?”

Mickey bares his teeth in a humorless grin, then ducks down to the floor and picks up the android’s shoes and jumpsuit. “Clothes are for people,” he tells it, and then he stalks out of Engineering, leaving the android standing there, as still as a statue.


	3. Helix

Mickey keeps up his torment of the android for a few more days, but his heart’s not really in it any more. He was only doing all that shit to get a reaction, and he achieved that. The thing hates him. It thinks he’s _awful._ Which is fine, great, whatever. But it kind of sucks the fun out of bullying it.

Plus, Mickey is worried about what the android might decide to shoot out of an airlock next. He brought a _lot_ of contraband onto this ship.

So he stops calling the EN-30 to do chores for him. He passes it in the corridors, and he does his usually weekly checks. But he doesn’t talk to it beyond essential communication, and he doesn’t go out of his way to spend time with it. He plays video games with the shitty in-game AI, and he silently seethes every time he loses.

He keeps the jumpsuit and shoes that he stole in a drawer under his bunk. The android doesn’t ask for them back, doesn’t steal them back, and doesn’t get replacements. It carries out all its usual duties in the nude, seemingly unphased by the new status quo.

After a couple of weeks it’s time for their next jump, so Mickey heads up to the bridge to make sure everything’s ready. The android is finishing up its checks when he arrives, and once it’s done Mickey checks everything again. The ship is at its highest risk of damage or malfunction during jumps, and so they have to be extremely thorough. Fortunately, the auto-pilot takes care of the actual flying part.

When they’re close to the jump, a timer appears on the screen and Mickey sits down in the captain’s chair and snaps the harness into place. If the android objects to his choice of seating, it doesn’t protest. It sits down at the comms station, and attaches its own harness. Then it starts counting down in its calm, smooth voice.

“Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

Mickey considers telling it to shut up, but to be honest the jumps make him kind of jittery and the android’s voice is pretty soothing - probably by design. So Mickey just leans back in the chair and grips the harness across his chest tightly with both hands and tries to breathe deeply.

“Five, four, three, two, one…”

The bridge shakes and sways as they make the jump, and Mickey groans quietly. The stars ahead are bending, distorting, and then turning into long streaks of light. Bright colors flash past them - nebulae and distant galaxies and black holes that bend light around them - but Mickey only catches a glimpse of them before he squeezes his eyes tight shut and grits his teeth and groans as the jump makes his head hurt and his internal organs squelch unpleasantly. Finally, he feels the lurch of their exit, but a wave of nausea washes over him and suddenly everything goes dark.

-

When he wakes up, Mickey’s lying on a cool bench and his head no longer hurts. The android probably administered a painkiller while he was unconscious. Mickey hopes it didn’t do anything else while he was passed out - like teabag him or shave his eyebrows. Suddenly, he really regrets being mean to the thing.

Mickey opens his eyes at last, expecting to see the overhead in the infirmary. But what he actually sees takes his breath away.

It’s nicknamed the eye of god for a reason. It’s enormous - 2.5 light-years from one side to the other - and shaped exactly like an eye, its outer edges a vibrant orange that fades into cooler colors at its center. With the ship this close, it fills a large portion of the Observation Deck’s curved viewing window. Its gaze bores into Mickey, pinning him to the bench, like a great weight pushing down on his chest. It’s beautiful, and it’s absolutely terrifying. Mickey hasn’t felt like this since he looked out of a porthole on his very first space mission: microscopically small, with a lifespan so short that he will blip in and out of existence without the universe ever noticing him.

Mickey’s actually glad that the android jettisoned his weed stash. Looking at this while high would probably have melted his brain.

He can only handle the Observation Deck and the Helix Nebula for about ten minutes before he starts hyperventilating and he has to leave, for fear of falling into a full-blown panic attack. As he rushes back to his quarters, Mickey passes the android, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor next to its refueling port. It doesn’t look up as he approaches, and Mickey doesn’t look at it; just hurries past.

When he arrives back in his quarters, he closes the door and lets out a long breath. Then he lies down on his bed and pulls a blanket over his head, and doesn’t come out until the shaking stops.

Mickey does decide to brave the Observation Deck again, a few days later, but he stops in the doorway when he sees that the android is already up there. It’s standing in front of the enormous window, staring upwards, fearlessly, into the eye of god. Its bare skin is bathed in starlight.

Mickey watches it for as long as he can, fascinated. But before too long, the vast and unfiltered view of the cosmos overwhelms him again, and he scurries down to the lower decks. When he checks the ship’s logs, later, he learns that the android stayed up on the Observation Deck for more than five hours.

-

Five months into their 51-year journey, Mickey finds a malfunction in the EN-30. He runs a series of diagnostic tests, and determines that its battery isn’t charging properly and needs replacing. He takes it down to Engineering, and it lays down passively on a table while Mickey gathers the tools he’ll need, along with the new battery.

The synthetic skin is a pretty incredible bit of technology all by itself. It’s programmed with invisible seams so that it can be peeled off when an engineer needs to access the android's innards, and will seal itself back together as soon as it’s realigned. Mickey finds the seams in its torso - a Y shape, like the cuts made during an autopsy - and peels the skin back.

The android stares up at the overhead with a neutral expression. “Let me shut down completely,” it says. “Then you can replace the battery.”

“Yeah, yeah, this shit ain’t rocket science,” he retorts. “And even if it was, I could handle it.” He removes the clear plastic panel that covers the android’s chest cavity, and as he does so the inner workings light up in various colors, designed to let an engineer easily see what’s what. There’s a layer of clear cooling fluid clinging to everything, with cables carrying wires to various parts of the android’s body and - at the center of it all - the hard drive.

Androids don’t keep their brains in their heads. Instead, the brain and the heart are basically one big organ, working in tandem and sending signals and energy along the same channels. It’s a beautifully efficient system, and on the outside it looks like a large, black egg. The EN-30's core is made out of the same material as the ship’s flight recorder, and both are virtually indestructible. If a nuclear explosion were to reduce the ship to atoms, the android’s heart and brain would survive - floating through the vacuum of space, transmitting a signal that any ship within a few hundred light-years would be able to hear, in the hopes that its data might be rescued.

The battery is right below it, and Ian watches as the blinking lights shut off, one by one. Finally there’s a quiet whirring sound that winds down to silence, and the android’s eyes close.

Mickey knows that he needs to replace the battery, but first he takes a long look at the android. It really is a marvel of synthetic engineering. It even has nasal hair, for god’s sake. Every aesthetic feature also serves an important function: the eyes can see beyond the visible light spectrum of a human; the nose hairs can detect whether an atmosphere is safe for humans to breathe, and allow the EN-30 to constantly measure the air composition on board the ship; the android even has lungs that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, like a plant.

Looking at this tangle of machinery should make Mickey feel even more detached from the android than he already is - after all, here is rock-solid evidence that this thing is not a person. But there’s a calculated messiness to its innards that makes them look almost organic. When Mickey reaches in and pulls out the old battery, the fluid squelches around his fingers, still warm from the usual hum and buzz of the technology inside the chest cavity.

Mickey makes an effort to clear his head, and then fits the new battery. He checks the connections thoroughly, does a quick sweep of the rest of the EN-30’s inner workings to make sure nothing is worn down or at risk of malfunction. Finally, he turns the battery on and replaces the chest panel. The vacuum seal makes a quiet _whoomph_ noise.

The android is still offline. It will take several hours to reboot itself. Mickey folds the skin back into place and smooths his hand over it until it reseals. When that’s done, he leaves a hand resting on the android’s chest, and slides the other hand under his jumpsuit, feeling the skin of his own chest.

He concentrates as hard as he can, but Mickey honestly can’t tell the difference between his own skin, and the EN-30’s.

Mickey sits there for a while, listening to the soft whirs and clicks of the android’s system powering up again. Then he goes down to his quarters and gets the jumpsuit and shoes that he stole off the android all those weeks ago. He puts them on a stool next to the table, so the EN-30 won’t be able to miss them when it wakes up, and then hurries out of the Engineering bay like dogs are nipping at his heels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Helix Nebula](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1410/helix_blancoHubble_6145.jpg) AKA the eye of god AKA the eye of Sauron.


	4. Breach

The food supplies that have been provided to last Mickey for the journey don’t include any alcohol, but they do include yeast and sugar, and Hydroponics provides fruit, so Mickey starts brewing prison hooch down in the choking warmth of the engine room. The first batch turns out kind of bad (he’s out of practice), and Mickey spends a night hunched miserably over the toilet, puking his guts up. After that, though, he changes up the recipe a bit and pretty soon he’s got a good supply that he stashes in hidey-holes all over the ship.

The android notices, of course, when it gives Mickey his next regularly scheduled health check-up. It makes Mickey pee into a cup, then uses a pipette to place a drop of the stuff on its tongue. It frowns as it runs an analysis and then asks, accusingly, “Have you been drinking alcohol?”

Mickey shrugs loosely. Honestly, he’s still pretty hungover and he wishes he knew how to turn the android’s volume down.

“Mickey, you can’t get drunk. What if something goes wrong? Besides, alcohol is contra-”

“Contraband, yeah, I know. _Fuck_ , you’re such a dweeb. Is that programmed in or something? Dweeb mode?”

“If being a dweeb means keeping this ship and its passengers safe, then yes.”

Mickey swears under his breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, I’m a high-functioning drunk. I could fix this ship in my sleep. So just fucking drop it, OK?”

The android looks like it’s about to continue arguing, but then apparently it runs some kind of simulation in its head that tells it Mickey isn’t in the mood for a lecture, and drops the subject. It takes a drop of blood from his fingertip, and smears that on its tongue as well.

“Your iron levels are a little low. Try to eat more red meat.”

Mickey pulls a face. The meat in his diet isn’t taken from live animals, but is instead a synthesized version of the real thing. In theory it shouldn’t taste any different, but it’s not as satisfying eating a steak when you know it never grazed in a field or breathed fresh air.

After a round of other tests, the android declares Mickey to be in otherwise good health, taking off its latex gloves with a snap and disposing of them in the infirmary’s recycling chute. Mickey is readying a sarcastic comment when suddenly the lights turn red and a deafening, whooping alarm starts ringing through the room.

Mickey winces and covers his ears. “Oh god, what’s her problem?” he asks.

The EN-30 is silent for a moment, standing very still as it communicates with the ship’s computer. “Asteroid shower,” it says at last. “Approaching off starboard. Five minutes out.”

“What the fuck? Hey, that’s not a lot of warning!” Mickey yells, hopping off the examination table.

“We weren’t able to detect it before. It was hidden inside an ion storm. It only just broke through…”

“You gonna stand there and make excuses or are you gonna _raise shields?_ ” Mickey shouts the last two words, and hears a soft whir through the ship as power is redirected to the shields. His stomach lurches as he starts running for the bridge. Maybe that dumb robot had a point about the hooch.

Irritatingly, the EN-30 overtakes him and is already standing at the shields station when Mickey arrives, its expression calm and focused. Mickey plops himself down into the captain’s chair and brings up a visual of the asteroid shower.

“Fuck,” he comments, his stomach lurching again. “Look at the ass on that.”

The asteroid shower is enormous - at least fifty times the size of the ship, which itself is the size of a small city. There’s no way to avoid it. All they can do is hunker down and pray that the shields can handle it.

“T minus thirty to impact,” the android says. “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

“Stop with the fucking counting,” Mickey snaps, pulling his harness into place.

When the asteroid shower hits, there’s no dramatic shaking and lurching and fires breaking out, like in the old TV shows that Mickey’s been watching. The first volley is burned into harmless dust by the shields, and the larger asteroids are simply deflected and roll over them. Also, it takes _forever_ for the shower to pass over them; after the first fifteen minutes Mickey has gone from being extremely tense to being extremely bored, and when an hour has gone by he starts to doze off in his chair.

“Ugh,” he complains as they head into the fifth hour. “How much longer is this gonna take? I had big plans to jerk off and watch TV tonight.”

“Another hour, at least,” the EN-30 says, still sounding completely alert.

“Pain in the a-”

Mickey gets cut off by a distant screeching noise, and then the wailing alarm and the red lights are back.

“The _fuck?_ ” Mickey shouts, covering his ears.

After a momentary pause, the android responds, “Hull breach. Deck F.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s mostly superficial right now, but it leaves us vulnerable. If another asteroid strikes in the same place, it could cause serious structural damage to the ship. It needs to be repaired immediately.”

And with that, the android steps away from his station and sprints away from the bridge with mechanical efficiency. Mickey rolls his eyes, unclips his harness, pulls up the location of the breach on his tablet and runs after the EN-30.

He figures he’ll just take care of the airlock operation while the android heads out and repairs the hull breach, but when he gets down there he finds the EN-30 holding up a spacewalk suit.

“What do you need that for?” Mickey asks, frowning. “You can go out without it, right?”

“It’s not for me, it’s for you.”

Mickey stares. “The fuck it is.”

The android’s expression doesn’t change. “You’d better hurry.”

“I’m not going out there! You go out there!”

“I’m the only maintenance android onboard this ship. There are hundreds of qualified maintenance workers in hypersleep, any one of whom could replace you if necessary. You’re expendable. I’m not.”

Mickey gapes at the android, which is still patiently holding up the spacewalk suit. He knew these things were cold, but he thought that they were at least programmed with some tact. It’s a pretty chilling thing, to be told that you’re expendable.

“Fucking robots,” he says disbelievingly. “Give me the goddamn suit then.”

The EN-30 tries to help him into the suit, but Mickey shoves it away angrily. The suit is bulky and so heavy that it makes his back and limbs ache, but that won’t matter once he gets outside. Mickey puts the helmet on last, hearing a soft hiss as it locks into place. His own breathing is loud and fast, and Mickey’s heart is already racing.

Here’s the thing. Mickey _hates_ spacewalks. It’s like being up on the Observation Deck, only about a billion times scarier because there’s no window and no ship protecting him from the vast, cold emptiness of the universe - just a fabric suit and a tether.

“Mickey,” the android says, its voice tinny over the suit’s comms. “You can do this.”

Mickey glares at it through the curved visor of his helmet. “How about you shut the fuck up? Unless what you have to say is, ‘watch out for that asteroid,’ I don’t wanna fucking hear it.”

He stomps into the airlock, and heaves the patch kit in behind him. It’s almost too heavy for Mickey to lift right now, but soon it won’t weigh anything at all. Mickey attaches his suit’s tether to a thick metal hook, his hands shaking inside the bulky gloves. There is nothing he wants less than to go out there. It would be bad enough at any other time, but he’s going out into the middle of an asteroid shower.

The airlock is filled with a deafening hissing noise as it depressurizes, and Mickey feels the weight of the suit ease away and his feet leave the ground as the anti-gravity is switched off. He closes his eyes as he sees the airlock door open, takes a few deep, shaky breaths.

Space is silent. Completely silent. The only thing that Mickey can hear now is his own breathing, and the grumble of his stomach, and the shifting of his skin and jumpsuit against the inside of the spacewalk suit. He bites his lip viciously, then hisses, “Fuck it,” and opens his eyes again.

Looking out of the airlock almost makes Mickey puke. There are asteroids hurtling towards the ship at a terrifying speed, bouncing over the shields or burning up against them. Mickey hooks the patch kit onto his belt, and grabs the edges of the airlock door. He finds the first handhold on the outside, takes a deep breath, and then leaves the shelter of the ship.

The hull breach is twenty meters away. Mickey keeps his back turned to the asteroid shower and the rest of the universe and stares at the ship’s exterior with intense focus as he jumps from handhold to handhold. He focuses on staying the same way up that he was when he left the airlock, on maintaining his sense of up and down, even though there’s no such thing as up or down out here. Just directionless infinity, all around him.

The hull breach is small - roughly the size of Mickey’s hand span, from the tip of his little finger to the tip of his thumb. It’s a vulnerability, though, and another asteroid strike could rip it into the size of a house. Mickey pulls a sheet of aluminum alloy from the patch kit and lays it carefully over the breach, forcing himself to take slow, deep breaths as he uses a soldering gun to fix the patch into place. The process takes almost twenty minutes, and Mickey starts panicking about running out of oxygen, even though that suit has at least an hour’s supply.

The final step is to smear the entire patch area with this paste that hardens and becomes incredibly tough, sealing the repair to ensure that it won’t come loose with time or wear. Mickey uses it liberally, probably goes too far over the edges of the patch, but he doesn’t want to have to come out here again if he can help it. The paste slowly changes color from dark grey to pure white as it hardens, and finally the repair is complete.

Mickey packs up the repair kit and starts pulling himself hurriedly over the handholds, reckless in his desperation to get back inside. He’s about halfway there when he hears the android’s voice over his comms.

“Mickey…”

“What did I fucking say?” he interrupts, a snarling edge to his voice.

“Watch out for that asteroid!”

Clamping down on the swell of panic in his chest, Mickey forces himself to finally turn away from the hull of the ship. A chunk of rock has broken through the shield. It’s bigger than Mickey - big enough to flatten him, and it’s heading straight for him.

Mickey tries to swear, but the word gets stuck in his throat. Panicked, he launches himself towards the next handhold, but he uses too much force, and the angle is wrong, and Mickey bounces off the side of the space rock and then goes hurtling away from the ship at a terrifying speed.

It’s like every one of his worst nightmares about space comes true all at once. Mickey is spinning wildly, any sense of up or down obliterated. The tether has about a kilometer of slack and Mickey hits the end of it within about half a second, his wild launch away from the ship turning into a great arcing swing that carries him back towards it. He sees the hull rushing up, too fast, and is helpless to stop himself as he crashes into it with a bruising impact.

Rattled, disoriented, and frozen with terror, Mickey sees a spider’s web of cracks in the visor of his helmet. It turns the spinning stars into a strange kaleidoscope as Mickey goes careening away from the ship again.

This time he jerks to a stop even faster, and there’s a tug at his waist that Mickey recognizes as the tether being reeled in. He catches a glimpse of the airlock, getting closer, and at the same time Mickey becomes aware of how cold he is, how much pain he’s in.

There’s a breach in his spacewalk suit. He doesn’t know when it happened. The helmet has detected the breach and automatically sealed itself, but Mickey’s body is suffering. He’s freezing cold, and his hands and feet are starting to swell up from the loss of pressure. It hurts, oh, it fucking hurts so bad. Mickey might be yelling. He’s lost, helpless, at the mercy of space and the gradually shortening tether.

Mickey emerges from a brief bout of unconsciousness and realizes that he’s inside the airlock, and the door is closed. Mickey hangs limply in the air as the airlock repressurizes, and then crashes to the ground when the gravity comes back on.

There are hands tugging at his helmet, twisting it off, and Mickey’s head is being cradled gently, lowered onto something soft and warm. Mickey opens his eyes blearily and looks up into the concerned face of the EN-30.

“You’re OK, Mickey,” it says. “You did great.”

It’s sitting on the floor of the airlock, Mickey’s head in its lap as it calmly starts to undo the seals of the spacewalk suit. As Mickey’s heart rate starts to slow down and his panic eases away, he feels an anger swelling up inside his chest - more intense than any rage he’s felt before.

He rolls away from the android, slaps its hands away feebly when it tries to help him, and with great effort he manages to crawl free of the spacewalk suit. His hands are red and swollen, his feet much the same, with the swelling having crept halfway up his calves. The legs of his jumpsuit are tight around them, but Mickey forces himself to stand up, to start hobbling painfully down the corridor.

The android hurries after him. “Mickey,” it chides. “You need medical attention.”

“Get the fuck away from me,” he says, his voice hoarse and not nearly as strong as he’d like.

“Mickey…”

The android lays a hand on his shoulder and Mickey loses it. He whirls around, slams the android up against a bulkhead, his forearm pressed against its throat. It could probably easily overpower him, but it doesn’t - just looks down at him with wide green eyes.

“I don’t need _anything_ from you,” Mickey hisses. “If you try to touch me again, I swear to god I will rip your head off and fuck the eye socket, ‘cause that’s all you’re fucking good for.”

He shoves himself away from it, his chest heaving. He glares, waiting to see if the android will retaliate, but it just stays where Mickey put it, one hand coming up to touch its throat with pale fingers, those synthetic eyes staring at him like he’s a feral animal that could bite again at any moment.

Satisfied that he’s made his point, Mickey limps away to the infirmary to patch himself up.

 


	5. Repair

Mickey’s injuries heal within a couple of weeks, but the psychological effects of the spacewalk are more lingering. He has this vivid recurring nightmare of spinning helplessly through space, and he wakes up on sheets that are soaked with cold sweat. Mickey starts trying to sleep as little as possible, taking energy supplements and drinking endless cups of coffee. He has crippling headaches, so he takes more tablets to deal with those, but the painkillers upset his stomach and Mickey starts eating less food and drinking more hooch instead.

The android notices, of course. It pauses one day as it passes Mickey in a corridor and says, “You’re sick.”

“I’m fine,” he bites back.

But the stupid thing is persistent. It changes direction and starts trotting alongside him. “You’ve lost weight, and you look tired and dehydrated. You need a medical exam.”

“I don’t need shit from you, tincan. You can’t fix what’s wrong with me.”

“What _is_ wrong with you?”

Losing his temper, Mickey rounds on the android with clenched fists. “I got sent out into space and nearly died. Now I’m a little fucked up.” He taps his head. “Up here. So unless you got a cure for that, get the fuck out of my face.”

“I might be able to help,” the android suggests. “If you want to talk about it.”

Mickey laughs at the idea of lying down on a couch and talking about his nightmares to this thing. “Gee, thanks, but I hear the toaster is offering real good rates on therapy sessions. Think I’ll go talk to that instead.”

“I know as much about psychology as any human psychiatrist,” the EN-30 persists. “Even just talking through it with me could…”

“Listen, Milkoviches don’t sit around talking about our problems. You know what we do? We bury that shit deep down and drown it with booze, and eventually it gets better. Or it doesn’t, and you blow your head off with a shotgun like my Uncle Jimmy did. And you bugging me is making the shotgun look real tempting.”

The android’s eyes go wide and shocked. “If you’re contemplating suicide...”

“Oh fucking relax, it was a joke. Your vast knowledge of human psychology doesn’t include jokes?”

“It does. I also know that joking about suicide is one of the major warning signs that a person is seriously considering…”

“I’m not gonna fucking blow my head off, Christ!” Mickey’s headache is back. He needs to take another painkiller. He turns away and starts heading back to his quarters, and this time the android doesn’t follow.

-

The old Milkovich trauma recovery method turns out to be as effective as it always is - which is to say, not at all. Mickey’s daily checks start getting sloppy. He makes more mistakes. He stops going to the gym every day. He drinks more, and takes more painkillers to deal with his hangover headaches. It’s a downward spiral that guarantees disaster, and eventually disaster strikes.

Mickey gets woken up by a call on his comms from the android. He groans, and doesn’t hear what it says at first. Its voice sounds thin, strained.

“The fuck do you want?” Mickey grumbles.

“You need to get down to the engine room,” it repeats. “One of the cooling tanks has ruptured.”

Shit. Mickey hadn’t exactly been thorough in his engine room checks yesterday. God, his head hurts. “Can’t you deal with it?” he asks.

“No,” the android replies shortly.

Mickey lurches out of bed, pulls his jumpsuit on, and makes his way down to the engineering deck. He doesn’t hurry. A ruptured cooling tank is a pain in the ass, but it’s not an emergency. He stops to grab some tools and repair materials along the way, and then stops again to take a leak. Finally, he heads through the doors to the cavernous engineering room.

“Over here,” says a small voice, barely audible over the churn of machinery.

The android is sitting down next to the ruptured cooling tank, which is spitting steam in a billowing cloud. When he gets closer, Mickey realizes why the android couldn’t do the repairs itself. Its arm - or what’s left of it - is lying on the deck surrounded by a halo of debris where it was obviously blown off the EN-30’s body when the tank ruptured. The android stands up as Mickey approaches, its expression tight and the stump of its arm dripping various fluids.

“Fuck,” Mickey remarks, looking at the mess. “Why didn’t you tell me your arm was off?”

“The cooling tank is the main priority,” the android replies, its voice still strained. Mickey peers at it suspiciously.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demands. “Apart from the arm, I mean.”

“It’s just the arm,” the android replies. “It… hurts.”

Mickey is taken aback. “You feel pain? What the fuck for?”

The android brings up the hand that’s still attached to cover its stump protectively. “The same reason that humans feel pain. To tell me that something’s wrong.”

Mickey puts his hands on his hips and looks down at the remains of the arm. “You need pain to tell you that, huh?”

The EN-30 shrugs, then winces at the motion. “It’s so I can’t ignore it. The earlier models would carry on working after they were damaged, and because of the limited mobility they would cause further damage. A lot of them destroyed themselves before they could be repaired. So they gave us pain. Enough that it would hurt too much to carry on working.”

Despite himself, Mickey feels a twinge of guilt. It’s probably his fault that the cooling tank blew. If he’d been as thorough as he was supposed to be in his checks, he would have caught the fault and the android wouldn’t be feeling any pain right now.

Mickey feels a sudden bizarre urge to apologize, but he clamps down on it. “We’ve got spare parts for you in the workshop. Go clean yourself up.” He nods at the mess of frayed wires, torn skin and twisted plastic and metal sticking out of the android’s shoulder. “I’ll fix this, then head over there and fit you with a new arm.”

The android nods and says, “Thanks, Mickey,” which just makes him feel even worse.

Mickey shuts down the cooling tank so he can patch it up. It takes a while - longer than it should, really, because he’s still nursing his hangover. As he works, Mickey can’t stop thinking about the android. He wonders if it feels pain the same way that he does. He imagines his arm being ripped off in one blast, for no reason other than someone else being too shit-faced to do their job properly. If it happened to him, he wouldn't calmly explain the situation to the person who fucked up; he would fucking kill them.

And right then and there, Mickey decides that enough is enough. He needs to cut back on the boozing. He needs to start getting eight hours of sleep a night again, even if those eight hours are full of nightmares. He needs to get his shit together, because there are thousands of people on this ship and their lives depend on Mickey doing his goddamn job. The next time he fucks up, the fallout could be a lot worse.

When he gets to the workshop, the android has finished cleaning itself up and is sitting on a workbench, its shoulders slumped. It looks kind of pathetic, with its missing arm and its dejected expression, and Mickey feels that guilt bubbling up inside him again.

He pushes a panel on the wall and a storage area slides out, full of spare parts for the EN-30. There are arms and legs and heads - about a dozen heads, all lined up in a row and wearing vacant, neutral expressions. They’re fucking creepy. Mickey grabs an arm and slides the panel shut as quickly as possible.

It’s a pretty easy repair job. Androids lose limbs a lot - they were, after all, originally designed to do the most dangerous jobs in order to save on human casualties - so it’s just a case of slotting it into place and then running a series of checks to make sure the new arm is functioning properly. As soon as Mickey attaches the new limb and pushes the edges of the synthetic skin together to seal them, the EN-30 sags and lets out a groan of relief.

Mickey is worried that it might try to thank him again, so without really thinking about it he says, “So, uh, this was my bad.”

The android turns to look up at him, and Mickey quickly looks down at the arm, focusing on the repair.

“I wasn’t really paying attention during checks yesterday.” The words _I’m sorry_ can’t seem to make it past his lips, so instead he says, “It won’t happen again.”

If he was hoping for some kind of forgiveness or reassurance, he doesn’t get it. The android just looks straight ahead and says, “Good.”

Mickey bites down on an insult and starts squeezing the fingertips on the new arm one at a time, each time asking the android if it’s receiving signals from its skin sensors, and getting an affirmative answer. Then he makes the android move its fingers individually, clench them into a fist, work in collaboration with the other arm to tie a knot in a piece of string. Everything checks out fine.

There’s still a niggling feeling at the back of Mickey’s head, though - an urge to extend some kind of olive branch. It’s stupid; this thing is just a machine, after all. But finding out that the android can feel pain has unsettled him, and so without really thinking about it Mickey says, “Hey. You got a name or something? For when I call you on the comms.”

The EN-30 looks a little surprised. “Yes. My name is Ian.”

Mickey rolls his eyes. “No, that’s your model. Look, I know those other assholes called you Ian because they thought it was cute, but…”

“They called me that because I asked them to. I chose the name Ian. The first decision androids always make is choosing their name.”

“So why didn’t you ever ask me to call you that?”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Mickey finally looks up at the android’s face. The damn thing is smiling at him. It actually looks happy, for the first time that he can recall. And Mickey can’t help but wonder… if it can feel pain, and it can feel sexual desire, what else can it feel? He’d assumed that its reactions were just programmed for the benefit of making it appear more lifelike to humans - that it went straight from receiving a stimulus to providing an appropriate response, with no other processes in between. But Mickey is the first to admit that his programming knowledge is sub-par. Maybe Ian’s brain is more complicated than that.

“Uh, you’re good,” Mickey says, realizing that his hand is still on the android’s arm and hurriedly removing it. “Let me know if it starts playing up, but you should be… good,” he finished lamely.

Ian is still smiling. “Thanks, Mickey,” he says.


	6. Research

The night after the cooling tank ruptures, Mickey pulls up the ship’s files on the EN-30 and starts reading them. They’re extensive - pages of blueprints, operating instructions, maintenance reports, and details of its programming that might as well be in Greek, for all Mickey can understand. He learns that the android is a new build, commissioned specifically for this colonization journey, and that its hard drive includes data from the androids who served on the previous colonization ships - every one of them that could be retrieved. The EN-30 - Ian - remembers everything that happened on those long journeys, and everything that went wrong on the missions that failed.

The bulkheads and overheads of Mickey’s cabin have built-in screens, and he starts digitally pinning pages from the EN-30’s specs to them. Above his bunk is a detailed blueprint of Ian’s inner workings, and Mickey lies there at night and zooms in on the different parts, memorizes their configuration and how they fit together. 

The nightmares about being lost in space start to grow less frequent, and they’re replaced by dreams of digging around inside Ian’s chest - taking the android apart, and putting him back together again, with each component slotting neatly into place.

Mickey starts studying AI programming, just to try and understand more about how Ian’s brain works, but it’s exhausting and alien to him. He learns that the original design for the first truly sophisticated AI brains was made possible by neuropsychological research. They learned how human brains worked, and took the most useful elements from that while also trimming the fat and leaving behind the limitations.

Despite his growing obsession, Mickey doesn’t interact with the android much more than usual. If he’s a little more thorough in his weekly check-ups than he was before, Ian doesn’t comment on it. Mickey certainly doesn’t start palling around with Ian, but he calls the android by his chosen name and doesn’t go out of his way to insult him.

It doesn’t occur to him that his interest is unhealthy until the day Mickey goes down to the workshop and builds a new EN-30 shell out of spare parts. It doesn’t function, of course - there’s only one hard drive on board, and it’s inside Ian’s chest - but it allows Mickey to study the android’s body without having to explain himself to Ian. He examines every joint - every finger and elbow and knee with man-made tech mimicking the movement of muscles and joints under its pale skin. He opens its mouth and slide his fingers between its lips, feeling its teeth and gums, letting his thumb rest on the damp pillow of its tongue.

Mickey wonders what Ian would think, if he came down here right now and saw Mickey hunched over this limp doll. The thought leaves him suddenly mortified. Mickey hurries to take the non-functioning android apart again, and puts the spare parts back into storage.

He tells himself that his interest is professional - that poring over the details of how to take Ian apart and put him back together again will allow Mickey to be better at his job. After all, he’s not just here to maintain the ship; he’s here to maintain Ian as well, just as Ian is here to maintain Mickey. Ian knows as much about human anatomy and biology as any doctor. He could perform heart surgery on Mickey, if he needed to. It’s only fair that Mickey should know as much about Ian as Ian knows about him.

Mickey tells himself he’s just being good at his job, and he almost has himself convinced. Then one night, while Mickey is jerking off to his collection of porn videos, he finds himself frustrated and unable to come. He tosses the tablet aside in frustration, and stares up at the EN-30 blueprint. 

Mickey starts moving his hand again, slowly. He remembers the feel of that synthetic tongue under the pad of his thumb. He recalls the way Ian groaned when his new arm was attached. The way he looked on the Observation Deck, naked and fearless under the stars. Mickey remembers the way his hands sank into Ian’s chest cavity, the squelch of the cooling fluid between his fingers, and he climaxes with that image in his head, breath catching in his throat as his hips lift off the bed and come dribbles over his fist and drips onto his soft lower stomach. The orgasm is fast and unexpected, and it leaves him panting wildly.

So, no, it’s not just a professional interest. But what Ian doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

-

“Ow. So why did they give you a dick?”

Ian seems unphased by the question as he smears the drop of Mickey’s blood on his tongue. He looks thoughtful for a moment, then says, “Your iron levels are good. And almost all androids have genitals.”

“Why, though?”

Ian smirks a little as he shines a light in Mickey’s eyes and peers into them. “Look to the left. It was the first thing they got right.”

“They got the dicks right first?”

“Actually, they got pussies right first. Then dicks. Look to the right.”

“Why?”

“Well, the first androids - the first sophisticated ones, anyway - were sex dolls. The sex industry was the driving force behind the technology. Look up.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. It was the same with a lot of things. The first video-on-demand websites were porn sites. The first card payments made over the internet were for porn videos. Look down.”

“So all the androids we have now are based on fuckbots?”

Ian clicks the little flashlight off and nods. He picks up a dentist mirror and a pick from the tray and says, “Say ‘ah’.”

Mickey has so many more questions, but he begrudgingly opens his mouth and lets Ian start poking around in there. Fortunately, the android keeps talking.

“To really advance technology, you need enough funding, and there’s always money in the sex trade. So all the big advancements that were made, they were made in sex robots first. It’s how they perfected synthetic skin. Synthetic muscle design all stems from the work that was put into perfecting the artificial tongue. The first android to pass the Turing test was a sex robot. Are you flossing?”

“Fuck no,” Mickey replies, finally able to speak again as Ian takes the tools out of his mouth. “So they just gave you a dick because it was, what, easier?”

“Pretty much. Sexuality is the cornerstone of AI technology. They could have taken it out for worker androids, but it was easier to leave it in. The only thing they added was the ability to say no.” Suddenly, he looks a little sad. “I mean, the ability to decide for ourselves, whether we wanted it or not. Some of the earlier models could say no. There were certain models where… saying no, trying to fight, it was part of their programming.”

Mickey feels a chill down his spine. Androids purpose-built to create that authentic rape experience.  _ Fuck,  _ that’s dark.

Ian glances up at him, seeming to sense Mickey’s discomfort, and adopts a lighter tone. “They actually didn’t develop androids that could feel pleasure until much later. It wasn’t really important, you know? But people started complaining that the responses felt inauthentic, so this one company put together a tech demo with an android that was capable of experiencing sexual pleasure. Then it was adapted to create authentic sensations of pain. Then they starting building robots that got pleasure _ from  _ pain, for the BDSM crowd. Your heart is beating really fast.”

Mickey forces some saliva into his mouth. “Too much coffee,” he says quickly. “So you’re, like, an eightieth generation vibrator?”

Ian laughs. It’s a nice sound. “More like two thousandth generation. It took a lot of work to get us right. And I’m mainly designed for the boring stuff - maintenance, repair, companionship.”

“Have you ever had sex?” Mickey asks curiously.

Ian shakes his head with a rueful grin. “I was assembled a week before launch. I didn’t have sex with any of the other crew members, and then there was just you. So no, I’ve never had sex.”

“Would you like to?”

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Mickey feels like he’s gone too far - feels like he’s shown his hand. But hell, one of his first real interactions with Ian was when he forced him to do a strip-tease and then tried to berate the android into sucking his dick. By comparison, this is pretty tame.

“Yes,” Ian says, after a momentary pause. “In theory.”

“The fuck does that mean, ‘In theory’?”

“It means…” Ian’s brow furrows a little. “I don’t walk around wanting it all the time. Neither do humans.”

“Some humans do.”

Ian doesn’t reply to that - which is fair, since it isn’t really a question. The android reaches up and starts feeling gently around Mickey’s throat, pressing gently on his glands. Suddenly, the air between them feels hot, claustrophobic. Mickey swallows, his adam’s apple bobbing under Ian’s soft, careful fingertips. He has nothing in particular to look at, so he stares at the delicate curve where the hard line of Ian’s jaw gives way to his neck. Mickey knows what’s under that skin; he’s studied the schematics over and over.

His heart is thudding in a way that can’t be blamed on coffee.

“You’re fine,” Ian announces, taking a step back and breaking the tension. “There are some signs of stress, but nothing to be too worried about. I’ll schedule another check-up for six months from now. You can get dressed.”

-

Before they were all put into hypersleep, some of the crew members asked Mickey how he was feeling about spending the next half-century by himself. He had told them, quite bluntly, that he felt fan-fucking-tastic about the idea. 

Mickey doesn’t like people. There have been people that he liked, but they were exceptions to the rule. When he was a kid he used to watch post-apocalypse movies, and he’d fantasize about walking around a completely empty Chicago - skating wherever he wanted without getting yelled at, walking into stores and just taking shit, and sleeping in a different big fancy house every night. Being alone on the colony ship isn’t exactly like that, but it’s pretty damn close.

It’s not until the end of the first year of the journey that the loneliness really starts to weigh heavy on Mickey’s shoulders. That marker of time really drives home that this is  _ it, _ for the rest of his life. He’ll be checking engines, working out alone in the gym, eating alone in the mess hall, and sleeping alone in his cabin for the next fifty years. If he survives to the end of it he’ll have earned a retirement on the new world, but their early days there will be a struggle to put down roots and build a new life. Mickey will definitely die before he sees the colony completed.

He reminds himself that it’s still better than staying on Earth. But that’s not much comfort to him.

So one night, when Mickey is playing the solo campaign of a video game for the fourteenth time in a row, he feels a stab of loneliness in his chest that takes his breath away for a moment. And without really thinking about it, he calls Ian on the comms.

“Something wrong, Mickey?” the android asks, when he arrives.

“Yeah, I’m bored to shit. You wanna play co-op?”

“Sure, Mickey.” Ian hops deftly over the back of the couch and sits down next to Mickey, who eyes him up warily.

“That’s not, like, an order or anything,” Mickey says. “You don’t gotta play if you don’t want to.”

“What’s the matter?” Ian grins cheekily. “Scared I’m going to beat you?”

“It’s co-op, dumbass. We’re on the same team.” 

But he decides to stop angsting about whether Ian actually wants to play the game, and they blow through a few levels easily. After a while Mickey kicks off his shoes, tucks one of his feet under the opposite thigh, so that his bare toes are just barely brushing Ian’s leg. And he feels that great weight in his chest start to ease.


	7. Reveal

“I can’t fucking do this.”

They’re in the corridor outside the main module of the Observation Deck, and Mickey has pussied out. He’s not ashamed to admit it. He’ll admit anything, so long as he doesn’t have to go through that door.

Ian folds his arms. Since Mickey started being not-completely-horrible to him, the android’s back-talk has increased exponentially.  “You’re really going to spend the next fifty years not looking at the stars? You might be the only human ever to go this way. The colonists are going to want to hear stories about the journey. Are you going to tell them that you hid on the lower decks the whole time?”

“No, I’m gonna tell them I got hit by an asteroid and flung out into space, and I kinda lost my taste for it!”

“And what if you need to do another spacewalk?”

The thought alone makes Mickey want to hurl. God, it could happen, though. If there’s another hull breach, or the solar panels need repairing. He hates to admit it, but the android has a point.

Ian is smiling a little now, apparently pleased by the fact that Mickey couldn’t come up with a retort. “We’re passing the Orion molecular cloud complex right now,” he offers in a coaxing voice. “It’s supposed to be pretty beautiful.”

“Oh great. A bunch of shit exploding in space. Yeah, that sounds really calming.”

“It’s not just shit exploding,” Ian chides. “I mean, mainly it’s shit that exploded a long time ago. There are new stars being born there as well.”

It’s like he knows exactly how to get under Mickey’s skin. When Mickey was a kid, he used to shoplift books about astronomy. He would read them under the covers with a flashlight - learning about supernovas and black holes and pinwheel galaxies, and he would imagine one day going up to space and seeing them for himself. But when he did eventually go up there, he never got more than a few hundred light years away from Earth. Everywhere he went was already thoroughly explored, and they were never more than a couple dozen light years away from the nearest space station.

This is different, though. Not many ships come out as far as they are right now, and soon they’ll be heading into pockets of space that only scouting ships have been to before. Mickey will be able to see all those things that he saw pictures of in his astronomy books, but this time they’ll be up close. And shit, yeah, he’ll probably regret it later if he stays cooped up in his quarters while the universe passes him by.

“Fuck.” Mickey squeezes his eyes tightly shut, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Let’s get this shit over with, then.”

“That’s the spirit,” Ian says, tapping the door control and placing one hand gently on Mickey’s shoulder.

Mickey lets Ian guide him to face the open doorway, his heart pounding madly. But when he walks through, the nightmare that he expects doesn’t come. Perhaps it’s because this time he’s walking in voluntarily, instead of just waking up under the petrifying glare of the Helix Nebula, but this feels a lot more like what he imagined when he was a kid.

They’re close enough that the Observation Deck’s window only reveals a slice of the cloud complex. The whole thing is hundreds of light years in every direction. Mickey recognizes a few features - the Horsehead Nebula, with its crimson glow, and the blinding brightness of Alnilam, the middle star of Orion’s Belt - but most of it is just a wild cascade of colors. There are new stars forming from the wreckage of old stars, and vast clouds of dust and gas colliding and spreading and creating.

Ian’s hand slides down to the small of Mickey’s back, pushes him gently, and Mickey walks forward, entranced.

It’s scary, yes, but not the raw terror of the botched spacewalk. It’s scary because this is the universe, on fantastic display, and Mickey is here to witness it while everyone else sleeps. He walks into the center of the observation module, craning his neck, looking all around him and trying to memorize it all. He makes his way over to the bench and lies down, staring straight up so that the cloud complex swallows up everything except the very peripheries of his vision.

Mickey feels like he could lie here forever.

“Room for one more?” Ian is standing a little way off, his hands in the pocket of his jumpsuit, smiling in a way that almost looks affectionate.

A little reluctantly, Mickey sits up on the bench so that Ian can sit down next to him. The android is warm at his side; the hum of technology under his skin means that he hovers around the same body temperature as humans - burning feverishly when he’s running diagnostics or doing something else that requires a lot of power, but cooler when he’s just hanging out playing video games.

Mickey looks at the android sidelong. His eyes are dotted with the reflections of the astral bodies above them, and his skin looks extra pale under the starlight.

“Does this do anything for you?” Mickey asks curiously. “Like, I know you’ve got pleasure-pain feelings nailed down. So does this just light up all your pleasure responses, or is there other shit going on as well?”

Ian carries on staring up at the cloud complex he replies. “There’s more to it than just pleasure but… I don’t know how to explain it.” He pauses, then asks, “How does it make you feel?”

Mickey looks back up at the cosmos. He struggles to find a word that can sum up everything he feels about being confronted with this vast, beautiful, indifferent canvas.

“Good,” he says lamely. “It makes me feel good.”

He’s expecting to be mocked, but Ian just nods. “It makes me feel good too.”

Ian turns, then, and looks at Mickey. Mickey stays staring upwards for a few seconds, feeling the weight of Ian’s gaze. Finally he relents, tears himself away from the universe and turns to Ian. He nearly has a heart attack when he sees that Ian is staring at his mouth, and tilting his head a little, like a curious puppy.

And Mickey thinks, distantly, that this is goddamn destiny itself at work. The moment couldn’t be more perfect. He may not really know how Ian’s brain works, but he has fifty years to figure that out. What he can do, right now, is give Ian his first kiss, right here, under the stars. Maybe he can even give Ian his first fuck, with the weight of the universe on their backs. Hell, it would be interesting to find out what a hundred years of fine-tuned fuckbot technology has wrought.

He looks at Ian’s soft, pink, slightly parted lips, and he starts to lean in as well.

The ship’s alarm blares through the Observation Deck. Mickey practically jumps out of his skin, jerking backwards and looking up furiously.

“The fuck is going on now?” he explodes.

Ian is quiet for a moment before he speaks, suddenly all business.  “There’s a ship approaching. It just dropped out of a hyperspace jump.”

“A ship? The fuck is another ship doing all the way out here?” An incredible thought occurs to Mickey, and he asks in a hushed, excited voice, “Is it aliens?”

Ian shakes his head. “Not aliens. It’s from Earth, but it’s not any kind of government ship. Looks civilian.”

Mickey pulls his tablet out and unfolds it, then pulls up a visual of the ship of the screen. “Oh _fuck,_ ” he mutters. He stands up and starts running for the door, with Ian hot on his heels.

“What is it?” Ian asks. He sounds a little unnerved that Mickey knows something he doesn’t.

“It’s fucking pirates, _shit._ I recognize their markings.”

Ian considers this for a moment. “They can’t be out here by accident. They must have been following us.” He frowns. “But why? Their ship is a fraction of the size of ours. There’s no way their weapons would be able to penetrate our shields.”

Mickey winces. “Actually, there is.” He doesn’t want to keep talking, but Ian needs to know. They’re halfway to the bridge now, and if he explains this then maybe Ian can come up with an idea of how to stop the pirates. “They can use a highly focused beam to create a small opening in the shields. Enough for them to pass through. Then they’ll probably attach their ship to one of our airlocks, and hack into the local controls. That’s how they’ll board us.”

“You’ve seen this before?” Ian asks, but before Mickey can answer the android stops dead in his tracks, and adopts the vacant expression that tells Mickey he’s talking to the ship’s computer.

Mickey staggers to a halt, turning back to face Ian. “What? What is it?”

“They’re hailing us!” Ian replies, and the outrage in his voice is almost funny - like he couldn’t believe the pirates would be so bold.

Mickey jostles the android into running again, and Ian quickly overtakes him and arrives on the bridge first. The hail from the pirate ship is up on the main screen, awaiting their response. Mickey’s heart sinks.

“Don’t answer,” he says quickly, but Ian is already at the comms station.

“Maybe we can negotiate with them,” he suggests, and Mickey wonders how an AI with so much brainpower can be so stupidly naive. Before he can protest again, Ian has taken the call.

They both turn to look at the screen, which is filled with the grinning, gold-toothed face of the pirate captain. “Howdy, boys,” he says. “What are you doing out here all alone?”

“This is the colony ship The New Hope,” Ian says calmly, clasping his hands behind his back and straightening his posture. “We’re on a mission to establish the first human civilization in the Andromeda galaxy.”

The pirate whistles through his teeth. “That’s quite a way, boys. I hope you got lots of supplies to last you the journey.”

Ian smiles humorlessly. “As I’m sure you know, every extra gram matters when it comes to the initial launch. So we’re only carrying the essentials.”

Which is true, technically. Of course, The New Hope’s “essentials” amount to billions of tons of materials, many of which are highly valuable - the most valuable cargo of all being the ship itself. The hyperspace engine is one of the largest ever built, and stealing it would make any pirate crew rich for many, many lifetimes.

“Now, don’t be modest.” The pirate captain leans in a little closer, his crudely tattooed face filling the screen. “I sure would like to step onboard and take a tour of the place.”

Mickey really didn’t want to get involved in the ‘negotiation’ process, but apparently none of the previous colony missions had encounters with pirates, because Ian seems clueless as to the danger they’re in. Reluctantly, he takes a step forward.

“Beat it, asswipe,” he sneers. “Before I give you a tour of our ammo stockpile. Don’t worry about coming to us, we’ll send it to you.”

He was kind of praying that the years had changed him, but the pirate captain squints, and then his eyes widen.

“Fuck me,” he exclaims, dropping the howdy-doody act in his astonishment. “Is that Mickey Milkovich?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mickey sees Ian turn to look at him.

“Yeah, it is, Lester. And I still remember all your little tricks. So maybe now you know who you’re dealing with, you wanna turn your ass back around before I shove a bunch of torpedoes up it.”

The pirate captain lets out a great, booming laugh. When he manages to catch his breath he wheezes, “Well, look at you. Little Mickey Milkovich grew up and became a government stooge. Look at your smart little jumpsuit. That’s just adora-”

He’s cut off abruptly, the screen turning blank again. Mickey looks over with trepidation and sees Ian hunched over the comms console.

“Mickey,” the android says, his voice low and dangerous. “How does that pirate know you?”

Mickey sighs. This is probably the worst way for this to come out but… he probably would have ended up telling Ian sooner or later. “I used to be on his crew,” he confesses quickly. “I was young, and I wanted to get into space, and I didn’t care how I did it. My family used to fence stolen shit that the pirates brought back to Earth, and that’s how I got my first job. It’s where I learned to repair ships.”

Ian finally turns around, and Mickey is taken aback by how shaken the android looks. “I didn’t know,” Ian says, in this awful, hollow voice. “I didn’t know any of this.”

Mickey holds his hands out placatingly. “Look, I wanted to go straight. Those guys… I ain’t exactly Mother Theresa, but those guys did some fucked-up shit, and I wanted out. I wanted to start doing real jobs, legit jobs. So I did, I started working civilian ships and commercial flights. And when I heard there was an opening here… I wanted so badly to get off Earth for good. My sister has this cushy government gig and she was in charge of background checks for The New Hope, so she was… just kinda selective about what she included in my files, and what she left out.”

A harsh buzzing noise fills the air. Mickey rushes to a console and swears under his breath. “They’re cutting into the shield!” he calls to Ian, then jumps when he turns around and finds that Ian is standing right behind him, his posture stiff and his expression equally so.

“Just like you said they would,” Ian remarks coldly.

Mickey reads into the meaning and groans impatiently. “Oh come on, man, I have _nothing_ to do with this. I haven’t seen these guys for years. I swear, I’m not working with them.”

But Ian doesn’t seem to be listening. His brow furrows as if in pain, and he shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he says again, like he’s trying to comfort himself. “I didn’t _know._ ”

“Ian, snap out of…” But Mickey gets cut off by the choking grip of Ian’s arm around his neck, with its immovable android strength. He didn’t even see Ian grab him, it happened so fast. He claws feebly at Ian’s forearm, trying in vain to draw breath, but his head feels like it’s swelling and there are bright spots in his vision that burst like supernovas, and leave behind nothing but inky darkness.


	8. Defend

When Mickey wakes up, the first thing he sees is the overhead above his bunk, with Ian’s schematics still on display. For a moment he just lies there, relieved - fully convinced that the pirates were just part of some weird dream, and that it’s over now. But then his body comes a-knocking and presents him with an itemized list of all the different ways he’s in pain: his throat, his head, and various bruises around his body.

Mickey reaches up and touches his tender throat. Shit. Not a dream, then.

He suddenly sits bolt upright, his panic levels rising. How long has he been unconscious? Are the pirates still here? Mickey staggers over to the door and presses the control to open it.

The door doesn’t open.

Mickey stares at it in disbelief. “Oh no you fucking didn’t,” he mutters murderously. He slams his hand down on the control again, with similar results. “You did not fucking lock me in here, Ian. You are not that goddamn stupid.”

But apparently Ian is that goddamn stupid, because no matter how many different insults Mickey comes up with for Ian, the door control, and the universe at large, he remains trapped in his cabin. Ian took his tablet as well, so Mickey has no way of knowing what’s going on out there - whether the pirates have boarded, or if Ian’s managed to deal with them by himself. One thing’s for sure, though: Mickey’s not just going to sit here twiddling his thumbs, hoping that Ian will come and let him out eventually.

Fortunately, Ian hasn’t yet managed to confiscate all the contraband Mickey brought with him.

He grabs a crowbar from under his bunk, and uses it to lever one of the screens (this one showing a cross-section diagram of Ian’s eyeball) away from the bulkhead. Behind it, tucked into a hollow little space, is a small package of greyish powder. Mickey pulls it out carefully, then grabs a lighter from under his pillow (he was planning to use it to light his weed pipe, before Ian shot all his weed into space), and finally brings the three items over to the door.

The crowbar gets wedged in right below where Mickey knows the locking mechanism is. He leans his weight on it, and the door groans but doesn’t give way. That’s fine. If it could be broken open with a crowbar, Ian wouldn’t have left the crowbar behind.

Next, Mickey takes the package of powder (thermite - always useful, if you’re smart enough not to burn your fingers off trying to use it) and sprinkles it on top of the crowbar head, inside the doorway. Once he’s crammed as much powder in there as the room will allow, he sprinkles a little trail of it along the length of the crowbar.

Then Mickey stops, and takes a few breaths, because this is the part of the plan that could seriously injure him if he fucks it up. But Ian’s out there and he could be (let’s face it, he almost definitely is) in trouble. Even if he did put Mickey in a chokehold and lock him in his quarters, Ian doesn’t deserve to die at the hands of pirate scum.

Mickey considers throwing out a prayer to whatever cosmic deity might be passing by, but in the end he just says “fuck it” and lights the end of the thermite trail, and then leaps away as fast as he can to the opposite corner of the cabin and throws his arms over his face.

In the small space, the heat is overwhelming. Even behind the pillow of his arms, Mickey sees the angry flare of bright light and winces, suddenly terrified that he’s going to set the whole damn cabin on fire. But after a few seconds the heat and light start to sputter out, then fizzle into darkness and silence. Carefully, Mickey lowers his arms.

There’s a hole burned clean through the door, right where the lock used to be. The crowbar is lying on the floor, its head blackened with soot and partially melted. Mickey approaches it slowly - pulls the sleeve of his jumpsuit up over his hand and carefully picks the crowbar up by the non-burned end. It’s warm, but not enough to sear his fingertips off, and Mickey uses it to lever the door open enough that he can pass through.

Outside, in the corridor, it’s eerily quiet. There are no red lights, and no blaring alarm. But there is a vague sense of something that sends a shiver down Mickey’s spine - a feeling of violation. The pirates are onboard. He knows it. The ship is in danger.

Mickey forces himself to stay calm, and to think rationally. Lester and his crew aren’t going to try and load up their puny ship with cargo from The New Hope. No, they’ll want to steal the ship itself. That means that they’ll have made for the bridge, to try and hijack the flight controls. Gripping the crowbar tight in his hand, Mickey starts running towards the bridge.

-

He finds Ian in front of the doors to the bridge, lying next to one of the pirates. The pirate is dead - his head torn clean off his body by android strength - but even Ian wasn’t a match for a whole pirate crew. Mickey sees the smoking remains as soon as he turns the corner, and frantically prays that it’s a human body. As he gets closer, though, he sees that the twisted, shrunken limbs are made of metal and synthetics, not flesh and bone.

Mickey approaches slowly, and sinks to his knees next to the destroyed body. It’s curled up in the fetal position, with its fingers curled into claws. Mickey doesn’t know what android pain feels like, or how intense it is, but he can’t think of a worse way to go than being burned alive.

“You stupid asshole,” Mickey whispers, his voice shaking a little. “You stupid, stupid goddamn robot.”

The remnants of Ian’s synthetic skin are still clinging to his blackened skeleton, and Mickey carefully peels them away from Ian’s torso. The heat has fused his chest panel closed, but Mickey manages to lever the crowbar into a small gap, cracking it open. He winces at the noise, but fortunately no pirates come running to investigate.

Inside Ian’s chest cavity the cooling fluid has evaporated and there’s a twisted, melted mess of wires and cables and components. At the center, though, that nigh-indestructible black egg remains unmarked by the fire and heat. Mickey reaches in, carefully, and plucks Ian’s heart and brain out of the remains of his body. He cradles it in his hands, and looks down at it despairingly.

“I’m going to build you a new body,” he vows. “And then I’m going to slap the shit out of you.”

He stands up, depositing Ian into the pocket of his jumpsuit.

“But first, I’ve got some pirates to kill.”

Mickey recognizes the dead pirate as One-Eyed Bill, this skeevy old fucker who was on Lester’s crew while Mickey was there. They’ve taken his blaster, of course, but Mickey happens to know that ol’ Bill always kept a spare strapped to his calf. Wrinkling his nose, Mickey crouches down next to the decapitated body and tugs the pants leg up. Yep, there it is - Bill’s backup gun.

He draws it out of his holster, then approaches the door to the bridge slowly. He can hear the rumble of voices behind it - at least five more guys, if Lester’s crew is the same size it was when Mickey was part of it. He’s outnumbered and outgunned, but these guys are morons and Mickey has the element of surprise on his side. He can do this. He can take them out. For Ian.

Mickey takes a deep breath. Then he slaps his hand on the door controls and comes out blazing.

He fired off three shots. None of them land. Then he gets shot.

“Fuck!” Mickey yells, ducking back behind the cover of the doorway with blood dribbling down his bicep. The blast went right through his arm, and it feels like it might have grazed the bone.

The guys on the bridge are yelling, and Mickey hears heavy footfalls running towards him, so he sticks his gun around the side of the door and takes a few wild shots. He hears a cry of anguish, and the pirates fall back a little.

“C’mon, Milkovich, _think,_ ” Mickey mutters to himself, grimacing in pain. If he doesn’t beat these guys, he and Ian are both dead and the colonists will probably be sold into slavery. They’ll never reach Andromeda, and never start a new world.

There’s no way he can take them out with his gun now. They have plenty of guns, and apparently a flamethrower too. But maybe Mickey doesn’t have to shoot them. This is his goddamn house, after all. And he’s pretty sure The New Hope doesn’t want pirates onboard any more than he does.

Looking vaguely upwards, Mickey says, “Hey. Hey you. Yeah, I figure you must be listening. Those assholes in there burned Ian alive, and they’re trying to kill me.” He pauses to take a few more shots through the door. None of them hit anything, but the pirates fall back from where they were creeping forward. “I know Ian probably took my access away," Mickey continues. "But I need you to do something for me. I need you to turn up the artificial gravity on the bridge by about five hundred percent.”

There’s a pause in which Mickey just stands there, praying that this stupid ship is on his side. Then he hears a soft whir, followed by a chorus of thuds and pained yells from the bridge.

Cautiously, Mickey peers around the doorway. The pirates are pinned to the deck, groaning in pain, some of their limbs bent at odd angles. Lester is behind the captain’s chair, his face turned towards Mickey. He’s glaring murderously, and trying to hurl insults through a mouth that’s half-crushed against the deck. Mickey relaxes his shoulders, stares down at the pirate captain, and sneers.

“You picked the wrong ship to hijack, bitch.” To the ship he says, “OK. Turn gravity up by another five hundred percent.”

The resulting mess takes several days to clean up.

-

After he’s dealt with the pirates, Mickey heads to the infirmary and applies a layer of healing gel to the wound on his arm. It soaks through the hole and slowly starts to knit Mickey’s flesh back together, easing his pain a little in the process.

While he’s waiting for the injury to heal, Mickey takes Ian’s hard drive out of his pocket and lets it rest in his cupped hands, looking down at it. It’s hard to fathom that everything Ian is - his thoughts, his memories, and his irritating penchant for back-talk - are all contained in this thing, which is small enough to be held in Mickey’s hands. He smooths his thumb across the surface of it.

“I never lied to you,” he sighs. “I just wanted to leave all that shit behind on Earth. How was I s'posed to know it would follow me all the way out here?”

Ian doesn’t answer, which is understandable, but Mickey’s frustration continues to rise.

“You think I’m dangerous or whatever, but it was your dumb ass that nearly got the ship stolen by pirates.”

Ian doesn’t have a response for that either. Mickey turns the hard drive over in his hands.

“I was just starting to sort of like you, you know?”

Nothing. Just the quiet hum of the ship, and the slightly gross noises of Mickey’s injury healing at an accelerated speed.

“Alright, dickbreath. Let’s go get you a new body.”

-

So, it turns out that Mickey’s creepy obsession with how Ian works is pretty useful after all. It takes him about twelve hours to piece together the new body - carefully attaching limbs to the torso and running diagnostics to make sure everything’s connected properly, before finally picking a new head out of the creepy line-up. It turns Mickey’s stomach a little, to hold Ian’s disembodied head in his hands, with the copper-colored hair soft between his fingers, but he takes his time attaching it to the rest of the body. He doesn’t want Ian to end up with any weird facial tics, or with one side of his face paralyzed.

Lastly, Mickey assembled Ian’s core: the mess of components and parts that occupy his chest cavity. He puts each piece carefully into place, checking and double-checking the connectors. He gets a fresh battery, and slots it into the space right below where Ian’s hard drive will go. Finally, with a kind of reverence, Mickey places the hard drive in Ian’s chest, pushing gently until he hears the satisfying _click_ that means it’s locked into place.

The last step is to pour in the cooling fluid. It oozes up around Ian’s inner workings as Mickey adds it. It coats Ian’s heart and his brain, slicking the surface of the black egg and then swallowing it up completely. Mickey puts the clear panel back onto Ian’s brand new chest cavity, and then gently folds the skin back into place and smooths it together until the seams are invisible.

Then he hesitates, looking down at Ian’s nude form, with its graceful limbs and smooth, navel-less stomach. Mickey could just activate him now, but it doesn’t feel right to let Ian wake up naked. So Mickey goes into storage and fetches a new jumpsuit, and undertakes the arduous task of trying to dress a limp body without making too much unnecessary contact with Ian’s dick and ass.

When Ian is finally decent, Mickey picks up a tablet, hesitates for a moment, and then turns the android on.

It’s not a slow reboot like he saw in the last maintenance session. Ian’s hard drive must have done an emergency shutdown when his body was destroyed, and as soon as it’s turned back on it resumes doing exactly what it was then: throwing around a fuckton of pain signals.

Ian goes from limp to thrashing and screaming in a fraction of a second, knocking tools off the workbench and nearly punching Mickey in the face. He’s tossing his head wildly from side to side, his eyes squeezed tight shut and his face screwed up in agony. Swearing under his breath, Mickey does the only thing he can think of: he jumps up onto the workbench, straddles Ian’s kicking legs to hold them down, and then uses all his weight to pin Ian’s arms to the surface of the bench.

“Hey, hey, asshole!” he yells, which probably isn’t very soothing, but Mickey’s never had much of a bedside manner. “You’re fine. There’s no fire.”

Gradually Ian’s thrashing winds down into distressed twitching, and he opens his eyes slowly. His mouth trembles and his voice shakes as he mumbles, “Mickey?”

Suddenly very conscious of the awkward position he’s in, Mickey climbs down off the workbench, but leaves on hand on Ian’s arm just in case the android freaks out again.

“The pirates are dead,” he explains. “They’re smeared all over the bridge. I made you a new body.”

Ian sits up, swings his legs down to hang over the side of the workbench. He looks down at his hands, spreads the fingers, and then curls them into fists.

“Please don’t put me in a fucking chokehold again,” Mickey pleads hurriedly. “That fucking sucked. And I got shot because of your ass today, so I could do with a goddamn break.”

Ian looks up at him with those expressive green eyes. “You got shot?” he echoes.

Mickey shuffles his feet, suddenly embarrassed. “In the arm. And I took care of it already.”

Ian looks back down at his hands, and then swings his legs a little and tilts his head back and forth, like he’s trying to get a feel for his new body. “You rebuilt me,” he comments quietly.

Mickey shrugs in what he hopes is a nonchalant way. “I’m an engineer. Kind of my job.”

“I saw the stuff, all over your quarters. My schematics. Pictures of me.”

There’s no mirror in the workshop, but Mickey doesn’t need it to know that his face just went bright red.

“I thought maybe you were trying to find out how to deactivate me, forcibly. Or you wanted to know how much you could sell me for.”

Well, that stings. “I was doing my fucking job,” Mickey snaps defensively. “In case I ever needed to piece you back together. And hey, look at that…” He gestures at Ian’s new body. “It paid off. You’re fucking welcome, you prick.”

Ian doesn’t say anything, and the comments about Mickey trying to sell him continue to sink in and cause fresh offense.

“I get it,” he continues, raising his voice. “You think I’m a scumbag piece of shit because I come from a poor fucking neighborhood and I did what I needed to do to get out of it. Bet you’d be a lot happier with some fancy-ass academy fuckhole here with you, telling stories about all the fucking lacrosse games he won in college, or whatever. But you know what?” Mickey taps his own chest angrily. “I rescued your useless robot ass and I killed those pirates and I saved this goddamn ship. So _fuck you_ for judging me.”

The tirade doesn’t feel as satisfying as it should. Mickey’s chest is heaving, and there’s still a boiling pot of resentment and rage inside him. And Ian isn’t saying anything. He’s just sitting there staring gormlessly at the ground.

When Ian finally does speak, all he says is, “I didn’t know.”

That’s when Mickey gives up and leaves.


	9. Mend

After the pirate attack, things go back to the way they were before. Well, not _immediately_ before. They go back to the way they were before Mickey found out Ian’s name. He and Ian pass each other in the corridors, and Mickey does weekly checks of Ian’s systems, during which Ian sits there with a constipated expression on his face and only speaks when Mickey asks him something.

The android definitely seems morose, and a few times Mickey is tempted to cross the divide between them and offer a friendly word or two. But Milkoviches are good at holding grudges, and whenever he gets tempted to play nice with Ian, he forces himself to remember the look of shock and disgust on Ian’s face when he found out about Mickey’s past. He holds his anger and resentment and bitterness close to his chest, and refuses to let it go.

They might have stayed in this stalemate for years, had Mickey not found a crumpled cigarette down the side of his bunk - an escapee from the supply of cigarettes that he’d long thought he’d run out of. Mickey always does his best thinking when he’s smoking, so as he lays back on his bunk and watches the smoke curl and dissipate above him, he thinks about Ian’s troubled face, and the way he kept saying, _I didn’t know_. Like that was important somehow.

Mickey thinks about that for a while, and then he thinks about other stuff that Ian has told him over the past months: that being able to make choices is a fundamental part of his programming; that he knows as much about human psychology as any human psychiatrist. Mickey puts these things together and they… fit.

He smokes his cigarette right down to the filter, until there’s nothing left to burn. Then Mickey pulls his jumpsuit on over his tank top and boxers, and he leaves to go and find Ian.

-

“There was never a lottery, was there?”

Ian’s back stiffens a little when Mickey speaks. The android is on the Observation Deck, looking up at the array of stars and the pinpricks of distinct galaxies. They can see Andromeda from here - a distant, glowing marker, still half a century away.

Mickey walks forward, slowly. “I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out sooner. It’s stupid, to put a random asshole in charge of making sure the ship doesn't blow up. They didn’t just pull my name out of a hat. I was chosen.” He’s standing just a little way behind Ian now. “ _You_ chose me.”

The android turns his head a little, so Mickey can just see the side of his face. “As soon as they assembled me, they uploaded the files on all the possible candidates to my hard drive,” he confirms, quietly. “Humans have too much bias. They don’t see things as clearly as I do. And anyway, no one wanted that responsibility. No one wanted to pick the person who would spend fifty-one years alone in space. So they made me do it.”

He turns around fully, looking down solemnly into Mickey’s face.

“The first decision I ever made was choosing my name. The second decision I ever made… was you.”

Mickey lets loose a short bark of laughter. “Jesus. _Why?_ Why me?”

“There were people more qualified than you," Ian concedes. "People with more education, and more government loyalty. I had psychological profiles on you all. I had videos of your sessions with the psychologist. But out of everyone on the list, I thought that you had the best chance of handling the stress of the journey. The loneliness of it.”

“And then you found out I used to be a pirate.” It’s starting to come together now.

A shadow of distress crosses Ian’s face. “It was hard,” he admits. “A decision that big, that important… the second decision I ever made… to find out that I had incomplete data, that there was something so huge, that I didn’t know.” His whole body shivers, and he closes his eyes briefly, as if in pain. “Suddenly it was like… nothing was certain. And I panicked. I tried to get things back under control, but I just made everything worse.”

“Yeah, you did,” Mickey agrees, without much heat. He’s not going to pretend to understand how Ian’s funny little robot brain works, but he can imagine what it would be like to have the rug pulled out from under you like that. Ian’s problem wasn’t that Mickey used to be a pirate, not really; it was that Mickey used to be a pirate, and Ian _didn’t know._

Now that the truth is out, Ian seems a little exhausted. The android goes and sits down on the bench, his shoulders hunched over, staring down at the deck.

“So, uh…” Mickey scratches the back of his neck self-consciously. “What did you find out about me, from my files or whatever?”

Ian is quiet for a moment. Then he says, stony-faced, “You’re a bottom.”

Mickey stares. He laughs once, briefly. He can’t fucking believe those words just came out of Ian’s mouth. Finally he manages to ask, “That was in there, huh?”

“I inferred it.”

“You… inferred it. Great. And did that, uh, factor into your decision at all? Like, ‘This guy likes getting stuff shoved up his ass, he’s obviously the space hero we need.’”

“It was all part of the tapestry.”

“The tapestry. Right.” Mickey is aware that he sounds a little hysterical, but who can blame him? “Anything else?”

Ian shrugs loosely. “You’re loud and aggressive around other people, but you’re not an extrovert. Not really. You prefer to be by yourself.”

Mickey nods begrudgingly. Ian carries on talking.

“You don’t overthink things. You don’t have big existential crises about what it all means, or why you’re here. You deal with life as it happens, and you don’t worry too much about the future.”

“You calling me stupid?”

“No.” Ian looks up at him, smiling tentatively now. “I’m always thinking ten moves ahead. I have to. But for humans, that kind of forward-thinking wears you down. It would have been deadly, out here. We needed someone who could just… do the damn job. Get up every day and do it.”

Behind Ian, the universe unfurls for billions of light years in every direction. It’s still expanding; constantly moving the horizon a little farther away. And Mickey thinks that, yeah, this is the sort of thing that could drive you crazy. They’re on a mission to stake humanity’s claim on a fresh corner of the universe, but even after fifty years of travelling they’ll still only have explored an infinitesimally tiny fraction of it.

But in the end, that doesn’t matter to Mickey. He just wanted to get off Earth for good, and he’s already achieved that.

“And I thought you were hot.”

That jerks Mickey out of his thoughts. He brings his focus back from the great wide universe to the android sitting in front of him, with a sheepish grin on his face.

“You thought I was hot,” Mickey repeats, slowly.

Ian nods, and that’s when Mickey finds out that androids can blush. “I didn’t really realize until later. I woke up and I was… everything, all at once. They were asking me to make this big decision, but there was all this other stuff swirling around too. So I was looking at your files and watching your videos and I knew that you looked good, that I was interested in you, and I assumed it was because you were such a good candidate. I didn’t figure out until later that it was... you know.”

Well. At least that makes Mickey’s weird stalker behavior of the past few weeks seem a little less embarrassing, by comparison. After all, Ian did it first.

Mickey thinks back to how he treated Ian at the beginning of the journey - for the first few months of it, and suddenly he feels a fresh pang of shame. “Fuck. You must have been so disappointed when you actually met me.”

Ian’s face drops a little. He threads the fingers of his new hands together, nervously. “I didn’t mind so much, at first. The other crew members treated me like I was a pet or something. It was kind of condescending. I figured that even if you did think I was just a dumb robot, like they did, at least you were being professional about it.” The android looks down. “And when you called me and asked me to come to your quarters I was… excited.”

Mickey swallows, even though his mouth seems to have stopped producing saliva. “Excited?” he echoes.

Ian nods. “I would have slept with you,” he confesses bluntly. “If you’d asked me to. I would have done anything you wanted. But you didn’t ask me. You ordered me. Like I was just a… a dildo or something. And I hated it. And I hated you, after.”

And… yeah, that’s fair. Looking back now, the way Mickey treated Ian was pretty fucking awful. Not just trying to shove his dick down the android’s throat, but the way he punished him for saying no. Mickey has no idea how Ian could forgive him for that - if he has been forgiven.

Not for the first time, Mickey tries to say _I’m sorry_ to Ian. But the words just won’t come out. They stick in his throat, heavy and awkward, like his voice would crack if he tried to speak them aloud. Milkoviches don’t say _I’m sorry_. They just don’t.

But Ian looks so dejected. So Mickey does the only thing he can think to do. He reaches up and grabs the zipper at the throat of his jumpsuit, and starts pulling it down slowly.

Ian looks up at the sound - his expression surprised and wary. Mickey still doesn’t say anything, just holds the android’s gaze calmly as he unzips the jumpsuit, and then shucks it off his arms and upper body so that it hangs loosely from his waist. Mickey walks forward then, and kneels down a little clumsily in front of Ian, and puts his hands on the android’s knees, pushing them apart and leaning into the V of his legs a little.

He still doesn’t say anything, but he hopes that the message is clear: Ian can do whatever he wants now.

Ian’s expression softens a little. He reaches out and cups Mickey’s head in one of his big hands, his thumb resting on Mickey’s cheekbone. Mickey half expects Ian to unzip his own jumpsuit - to force Mickey’s head down and cram his mouth full of cock, to just use him. Honestly, Mickey's not totally averse to the idea. But all Ian does is sweep his fingers down to the underside of Mickey’s chin, tilt his head up, and lean in to kiss him on the mouth.

It’s not a deep kiss - it’s sweet, and a little shy - but Mickey hasn’t kissed another person for a long, long time, and Ian’s never kissed anyone at all. It’s only a small kiss, but it feels _important._

Afterwards, there’s a pause. Their faces stay close, exchanging rapid breaths. The high concentration of oxygen expelled from Ian’s lungs makes Mickey a little dizzy, and he grips the android’s legs a little tighter to hold himself upright. Ian tenses at that, then presses in for another kiss - this one deeper and hungrier. Mickey leans in closer, and slides his hands up Ian’s thighs, stopping at his hips and pulling the android forward a little. He’s dimly aware of the way Ian’s erection is tenting the loose fabric of his jumpsuit. Ian wraps his free arm around Mickey’s back, crushing them together, leaning his weight on Mickey with the youthful enthusiasm of his kissing.

And that’s when the artificial gravity betrays them and Mickey topples over backwards, and Ian gets dragged off the bench and lands on top of him. Mickey’s head bounces off the deck, and Ian’s teeth bite into his lip hard enough to draw blood.

“Fuck,” Mickey groans, his voice a little muffled where Ian’s shoulder has ended up shoved against his face. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this?”

Thankfully Ian doesn’t take offense at that - possibly because he’s too horny for the barb to really stick. “I’ve never done this before,” he says, trying to rearrange himself into a position that’s less injurious to Mickey, and pressing their dicks together in the process.

Ian’s eyes widen, like he’s just had a sudden revelation.

“Oh,” he says, softly. He grinds down again, deliberately this time, his cock a hard line that rides the meeting point between Mickey’s groin and his thigh. “Oh.”

Dry-humping isn’t really Mickey’s thing, but Ian seems to be enjoying it, and this is really about him after all. So Mickey spreads his legs a little more to let Ian settle in between them, and hooks his ankles over the backs of Ian’s thighs, then grabs a handful of the android’s ass and encourages him to thrust again. This time it must feel better, because Ian gives a shocked little cry, and starts rolling his hips rhythmically.

It’s kind of like being fucked, except with his clothes still on and without the penetration. Mickey’s dick gets enough sporadic friction to keep him hard, but Ian’s rutting is completely selfish - the frantic, clumsy thrusts of a teenager during his first time. Mickey’s fine with it, though. He presses kisses to Ian’s throat and jaw and mouth, reaches up to pinch and rub Ian’s nipples through the jumpsuit, and lifts his groin to give Ian a firmer surface to fuck into. Just when he starts to worry about the android’s dick skin chafing off, Mickey becomes aware of a growing dampness soaking through the crotch of his jumpsuit.

He looks down between their bodies in confusion. “Did you come?” he asks.

Ian shakes his head messily. “It’s lube,” he groans. “I leak a lot… during. It’s…” A whimper cuts the sentence in half. “...To make things go easier.”

Mickey takes a moment to process that and, well, fuck. Yeah, that is going to make things easier. Jesus, they left that out of the schematics. Must be a bonus feature.

Just as Mickey is starting to get uncomfortable, Ian’s thrusts grow sharper and his breathing speeds up. Mickey does what he can to help - biting Ian’s ear, spreading his legs wider, making filthy little noises of encouragement - and in no time at all Ian’s whole body stiffens and he goes “Ah, ah, ah!” like he’s just burned his fingers on a stove. Mickey grabs the android’s face, kisses his parted lips, and feels Ian start to shake and fall into a series of slow, haphazard half-thrusts as the pleasure winds down.

Mickey combs his fingers through Ian’s hair as the android relaxes into a loose slump on top of him. Then, because Ian doesn’t seem ready to move just yet, Mickey gently shifts him to one side and works a hand into his own boxers, gripping his aching, neglected cock. He jerks himself off quickly and efficiently, with Ian’s mouth pressed against his shoulder, and comes in three hot spurts, drawing quiet breaths as his body works through the gentle orgasm. Ian makes a drowsy, pleased noise.

The deck is hard and bruising against Mickey’s back, but he likes the weight of Ian on his chest so he doesn’t complain. He looks up at the universe overhead, and it doesn’t seem scary at all.

Later, they drag a big mattress up to the Observation Deck and lie down on it side-by-side. Mickey tries to pick out constellations that he knows from his astronomy books, but they’ve travelled far enough now that many of them have shifted and realigned themselves. Ian holds his hand and listens, and occasionally nods.

But when he speaks, he doesn’t talk about the stars. He says, “Do you know why they need both of us here? A human and an android?”

Mickey mulls the question over in his head. “Maintenance?” he suggests.

“Yes, but not just that.” Ian strokes his thumb over the back of Mickey’s hand absent-mindedly. “You could get sick, or go crazy, or start making mistakes. And I could malfunction, or break down, or…”

“Get burned to a crisp by space pirates?”

Ian laughs a little, and jabs Mickey in the side with his elbow. “They need us both here, so we can look out for each other," he continues. "And it always has to be a human and an android. I’m here because humans are imperfect. And you’re here because androids are imperfect.”

Mickey gazes up at the stars, Ian’s hand warm in his. And he thinks, yeah, there’s something kind of nice about that.


	10. Epilogue

They live in a house by a lake.

The house is one of the prefab buildings that the colonists brought with them from Earth, so the walls are thin, but Mickey doesn’t mind much. The planet they’ve settled on is warmer than Earth - mostly desert, but with vast, rich oases at the two poles. It never gets any colder than a hot summer day back in Chicago, so the thin walls aren’t really a problem, and Mickey likes to listen to the weird croaking and yelping sounds of the planet’s native animals when he’s falling asleep at night.

The waters of the lake are pink from the mineral deposits that run off the nearby mountain, and its main residents are these weird eyeless fish that navigate using their sense of smell. The colonists build a small, narrow dock for Mickey, so that he can sit out there in the evening with a fishing rod, or dangle his feet into the cool morning water.

When they first settled here, he was a little taken aback by the high esteem in which the colonists held him. Mickey had always thought of himself as little more than a janitor, carrying out the shit job that no one else wanted. But the colonists are fascinated by him - the man who stayed awake and kept them safe while they crossed the galaxy. The kids make him tell them stories about all the mishaps that happened along the way (there were a _lot_ of mishaps), and ask him what it was like to stare up at the stars on the long journey.

The planet’s original designation was MG-7729, but after they arrived the colonists settled on the name Home. Mickey thought it was cheesy as fuck, but they were so bright-eyed and enthusiastic about it that he managed to hold his tongue, and now the name has kind of grown on him.

The first few years were difficult. The journey itself was merely the first step; actually putting down roots on this planet and making humanity stick to it was the hardest part, and the part where a lot of the earlier colony missions failed. But now, six years later, they have a thriving little town carved out of the jungle. There’s a river that runs through it, and a mountain that towers over it, and rich strips of farming land. Barring any disasters, their population will continue to grow and spread out across the planet until there are entire cities full of humans whose families have lived here for generations.

Mickey is nearly eighty years old now. When they first arrived, he caught a bug that his immune system had no way of fighting off, and he nearly died - which would have been really fucking irritating after he got them all this way. But he pulled through, and Home’s climate has been good for him. He has all the usual aches and pains of old age, but no real health problems besides.

He still doesn’t like people - in fact, he likes them even less after spending fifty years away from them. They’re so noisy, and they seem to all talk at once, and the kids cling to his legs and call him Grandpa Mickey, and constantly badger him for more stories about space pirates and aliens (yes, he met aliens). Fortunately the house at the lake is set apart from the rest of the town, so Mickey can always make a strategic retreat when he gets overwhelmed.

At the end of one of the planet’s long, long days, Mickey sits on the deck with his pants legs rolled up and his feet ankle-deep in the water, looking at the pink glow of sunset that outlines the mountain. He doesn’t turn around when he hears footsteps approaching, because he knows it isn’t one of the colonists.

“Don’t catch cold,” Ian chides gently.

Mickey snorts dismissively. “It’s like a billion fucking degrees out here. I think I’ll be OK.”

The android sits down next to Mickey on the dock, their hips just barely brushing. He drops his left leg into the water, but keeps his right leg tucked under him. They ran out of spare legs shortly before the end of the journey, so when Ian lost another one Mickey built him a new leg out of parts that he’d cannibalized from various other machines on the ship. It’s a pretty good leg, Mickey thinks, but it doesn’t take too well to being soaked in water.

Ian is brandishing something. Mickey looks down, and he smirks when he sees that the android is holding out a carefully rolled joint. He plucks it out of Ian’s fingers and pulls a lighter out of his pocket, lighting the end of the joint and taking a deep drag.

“You fucker,” he says croakily, holding the smoke in his lungs. “Still can’t believe you had weed stashed on the ship the whole time.”

“We brought, like, tens of thousands of different seeds with us from Earth. _I_ can’t believe you never thought to check.”

Mickey blows smoke at him and Ian laughs, ducks away, then rocks back in again, nudging Mickey with his shoulder. Mickey holds the joint between his teeth and grins.

Ian is old, too, and probably overdue to be decommissioned. The pigments in his skin and hair have faded, and he only has one working eye, and he’s not nearly as strong as he used to be. He’s made a deal with the mayor that when Mickey eventually dies, Ian will be shut down and his shell will be donated to the small museum that they’ve set up. His heart and brain will be buried with Mickey.

When the joint is all burned down, Mickey flicks it carelessly into the lake, earning a disapproving look from the android. His aches and pains have eased, and he’s feeling pleasantly drowsy, so they both head back to the house and get ready for bed.

Ian falls asleep first - or rather, he lies down on the bed and puts himself in standby mode. His body clumsy from the high, Mickey tumbles onto the mattress and lies with his head on Ian’s chest for a little while, listening to the quiet hum of machinery inside him. Then he rolls onto his back, and looks up.

They have a skylight above their bed. It wasn’t part of the original prefab; Ian asked the colonists to add it as a birthday present for Mickey. The planet doesn’t have much cloud cover, and the stars are bright enough at night to make up for the lack of moonlight. Mickey has been learning new constellations, and giving them names.

He looks up at the stars, and instinctively picks out the shining little dot of the Milky Way - more than two and a half million light years away. Even now, Mickey still can’t believe that they travelled all that way. He can’t believe that they actually made it.

Mickey closes his eyes. He rests the backs of his fingers against Ian’s cool arm, the simple touch anchoring him, and he drops off to sleep with starlight on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and for all the kind comments!


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